


Perfumed in Obsession

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dirty Talk, F/M, Fingering, Light Dom/sub, Light daddy kink, Sex Toys, Sex Work, Size Difference, Size Kink, Soft Kylo Ren, also posted on Tumblr, and general misogyny, business partners turned lovers turned romance, camgirl au, camgirl!rey, gotta love that ben/kylo dichotomy, kylo's in porn and rey cams, like in canon, mention of porn industry problem with non-consensual narratives, nazi mention as in 'anakin skywalker was a nazi in this universe', not trying to change anyone's minds just trying to keep the discussion open and representative, oops suddenly we're getting real about the realities of sex work like it's a 'very special epsiode', performers dealing with narratives surrounding consent, porn star!Kylo, rey has a praise kink, sex positivity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 01:37:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 64,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15086198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: (very nsfw) Ben owes Rey a favor from a porn shoot between them gone wrong; but neither of them wants to admit it’s already been repaid in full. Because that means Ben could stop assisting in Rey’s Live CamShows any time he wanted to. But an accidental appearance during a stream has her audience demanding more of the mysterious “Kylo” and they have a new role for her assistant in mind. littlemissnobody and Kylo Ren are considered a match made in lucrative heaven, but what does that have to do with Rey and Ben catching feelings, and facing some demons along the way?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is...so much dirtier than anything I think I've ever written? I'm horrified.

Rey grimaces when the miniature roulette wheel sputters to a stop;  _20_   _squats_  is written in her own unassuming handwriting, but it makes her hate the words all the same.

The way the comments of her stream fill in, too fast to read one before it’s been pushed up the screen, it’s not quite what  _they_  wanted either, while she still has her underwear on at least, so she’d better keep them happy with what they get. 

She is so methodical in her accommodation she didn’t even notice Ben wordlessly swipe her half-melted ice pack off the desk behind the camera and vanish off to her kitchen to stash it back in the freezer so it’ll be cold later. He steps over the black sundress cast on the floor that she started the stream wearing but lost two spins ago. She had to take her knee brace off to film, for obvious reasons, but the squats are popular with her viewers, despite the toll on her body. She adjusts her bright yellow panties to hug her cheeks the right way and got right to it; her back to the camera, her lingerie-clad-ass slowly sinking closer into the depth of the frame each time she squats down. Her tips roll in like crazy, even though her legs shake whenever the show is over. 

Ben still volunteered that afternoon, setting up the section of her living room where she filmed, that she drop the squats, literally, and she shook it off. 

 _“Squats paid for this apartment,”_  she said dryly, focused on a spreadsheet in front of her. She was in an oversized sweatshirt, and he knew pretty well what was underneath, because of a lot of nights like the one they were currently in. 

Rey liked the control of filming out of her own apartment, switching to this from the Star Destroyer gig like he’d had for the past decade. Performers for objectively the same industry but in complete opposite ways. As Kylo, he was used to the randomness of showing up on set, the assignments, the trust in the system. Rey found that had failed her, mainly through pairing them together in a scene, and it was an embarrassment that led to his offer to help her go solo and assist with the setup of the show. 

What kept him around was more personal, but they didn’t discuss it. 

It’s not seeing her naked, with toys inside her little body, filthy words pouring out of her mouth, spread out and shameless. He could be on the other side of the screen for that, free to be a little less professional. 

It was after, when she shrugged on a big tee shirt, checking her analytics and charts and tips and view counts and percentages, cursing as she chugged water, blasting shitty pop music and dabbing sweat of her face. It was knowing who LittleMissNobody really was;  _Rey,_  her dry humor and disbelief anyone found her sexy because of something special, just tits and ass and the ability to flex the right muscles. It was bringing her a food binge right after the show with the refreshed expense account, their partnership in the schedule (one roulette days a week, one solo masturbation show, and now trying to squeeze in something new at the end of the week like a costume, weird toy, or  _guest_ ) and how she would suggest edits to the room and he’d counter them; Giant stuffed porg  _(her idea)_  red florescent lightbulbs  _(his)._

 _He_  hears her knee pop as she goes through the exercise, counting loudly and enthusiastically like she also does for her self-administered spankings that fill two thirds of the roulette wheel.  _He_  secretly begs the odds for a spanking, not to see her ass redden, but because she’d been distracted that afternoon- tossed him the marker, told him to fill it in, so his neat handwriting gives the order, not her usual scrawl.  _He_ sees the beads of sweat on her brow, when the only thing she lets anyone else sees in this moment is her ass. The obvious. The somewhat meaningless, when he sees her endorphins high crack through her focus, the slight smile at the expense of the creeps who’d pay to see this. 

_″19, 20!″_

She groans, facing the camera, bouncing around in her little bra and panty set. Yellow against her tan skin, when there webcam only catches the blue glow cast over her body that makes her look so pale. 

“You guys need to go easy on me!” she’s all smiles, even when Ben watches the comments she’s reading too on his own screen. There’s no such thing in these chats. That’s the thing about it that sucks. That it is for people who  _don’t-_

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know who watches his own movies, the heavy BDSM stuff, how many people have seen him naked and imposed some kind of judgement or projected some fallacy. He had to let Rey be adult enough to handle the same. 

He doesn’t mean to fuck with that perfect balance. It’s an accident. He had only meant to offer her a water. 

She is completely naked at this point, a few spins later, and has crawled back to the wheel. Ready for another go to keep the show moving, close to the little black shelving unit he had installed for her to display the toys she used during streams. He leans closer to offer her the cold water bottle, she smiles and reaches to take it, and his shoulder accidentally ducks into the shot. 

A few regulars knew he aided in these things for the purpose of the show, not every single one but enough for the occasional suggestion that Kylo was watching her do all this. Some liked it, used it as leverage to try and make her uncomfortable, but she was so desensitized to his presence that at this point she just ignored the comments, never confirming or denying. But a lot of men were threatened that it wasn’t just Rey in the room, performing for only them, which is probably why she never gave a straight answer unless she had to. 

“That’s just Kylo,” she says brightly, “Everyone say  _thank you Kylo!”_

There was a chorus, as if every horny thought has a collective hive mind, of  _you should fuck Kylo on camera._

He winces as he assumed she’ll tell them all she already  _tried,_  and it went terribly, but she goes still at a comment he misses when he glances up at her. 

“ _GoingForSnoke_ are you serious?”

Her mouth is hanging open. Ben’s eyes lock on the screen. 

**GoingForSnoke: He has big hands. I will give you $2,000 just for you to fuck Kylo’s fingers on camera.**

She tries to play it off, looking nervously at him. Which is a little unfair; he had passed her sex toys before, mopped off her naked body with cold towels, helped rinse various edible substances  _out of_  her body when the cameras were off, but ever since she walked off set in tears after their attempted first sex scene together at Star Destroyer, nothing had crossed that line for them again. But he gets it. It’s a way of getting another human involved, but not introducing him into the fantasy  _as a person._  Just a faceless hand with fingers to put inside her, so they could imagine it was  _their_  fingers. 

Just a way to deface her, take away her control. It’s an idea he’s ready to dismiss, but she looks…

“You don’t have to,” he mouths, shaking his head, but she shrugs. He looks down at her commenters. They all looked like they’d walk if she doesn’t. Tips are rolling in, promises of more to come if…

Rey tilts her head, chewing her lip. “You guys are making this  _so awkward,”_ she whines to the camera, but Rey never talks like that in real life, at least to him so he knows it was part of the character. The Cool Girl. The ideal girl who just wanted a hookup and no cuddling, who degraded herself with a smile and had no emotional baggage. Nothing like the girl he knew, and was growing to…

“If  _Kylo_  wants to,” she nods at him, her eyebrows giving him a coaxing expression. The Cool Girl always said yes. This was his to refuse, she was pretty good at shutting this stuff down before it started, like she had to with a lot of her hard limits that everyone wanted to test. Rey was a tough girl, but his heart is racing. 

She winks at the camera. “One second, guys.”

Rey sneaks offscreen, standing very close to him because of the layout of the room, they have very little space to go where they wouldn’t be seen. Ben tries not to focus on her naked body pressed so close to him. He’s in jeans and a tee shirt, like he is for every stream, hair tied up in a manbun. 

“You seriously don’t have to.”

She is speaking so quietly it’s basically just her mouth moving, but he can understand her. 

“Rey,” he sighs, “That’s for you to decide.”

She’s already lubing up as she looks up at him, a little covert bottle squirting into her hand. No one liked seeing a camgirl  _have to_  use lube, which was one thing he hated about this industry, because even he knew she needed it sometimes. 

“It’s $2,000 for  _one sex act,_ ” she whispers, like it’s obvious. He keeps forgetting she can’t be considered ‘new’ to this industry anymore, it’s been months. 

“That still means you have a right to say no. You can turn it off at any time, Rey.”

She smiles. “And I can also say yes if I want, Ben.”

He may have looked hesitant, so she touches his arm comfortingly. His cock hardens at this; not the free sex show he’s already seen forty minutes of.

“Just your arm in the shot?” She offers, “You won’t even have to move your hand, just let me ride your fingers?”

 _“Yes,”_  he sighs, more enthused than he meant to sound, but she’s already dragging him into place. Just his arm extended, two fingers instinctively pointed up. The lube is making her inner thighs shine in the red light.

Rey straddles his hand, otherwise extended into nothing, and rubs against it. He feels the lubricant coat his fingers, tries to contain a shudder when he comes into contact with her heat. The frame is a sexy image, disembodied, muscular arm caught between Rey’s legs as she stands in profile, pressing back against it. In actuality, he’s got a towel tucked into his belt and an ipad in his free hand, which is what he’s trying to watch instead of  _her._ New paid viewers are flooding in. 

She’s only looking at the camera. 

“I wanna see you make good on your promise, GoingForSnoke.”

Ben leans closer to the screen. The transaction goes through as promised, so he nods at Rey. She grins, nudging her bare ass against his extended hand, rubbing her pussy with her own hand, her tits with the other, smiling at her viewers.

He tries to remain still, let this be her choice, but there is a flood of warmth around his pointer finger and he almost cums at just feeling inside her when she takes him as deep as he’ll go. She gives a little shudder, he struggles to keep his one finger stiff and straight so this wouldn’t be any funny business. Just something hard and straight to fuck against. She’s done this with a million different things that weren’t him, he’s seen it.

Rey’s hand reaches blindly behind her, grasping his wrist. Her hips give a little jerk, and he looks at her face and is shocked to find it isn’t her  _Cool Girl Faking It Face._  Her porn face, the girl who can cum  _massively_  from straight penetration railing against her cervix; that girl who doesn’t exist. That’s not the face she’s making. It is a face he hasn’t seen before; a little afraid, a little helpless, as her pussy shallowly pumps up and down his finger. 

She glances at the screen, enraptured. “Yeah, I-I can take two,” she says to some commenter, and there was a  _ding_  of a hefty tip, and she’s nudging his hand to signal to him  _another._  

This one he does press in, testing, and her head falls back with a whine. He feels her inside clench down on him. The whine is a little performative, but her hips are riding his two finger like they can’t help it. He struggles to keep still, but he still hasn’t adjusted to being placed inside her, the wetness, and he flexes them, unwittingly  _curling_ -

Rey gasps, holding his hand from the front of her and wrist from behind and ducking forward with a moan.

“Your fingers are really big,” she says quietly, and shame cuts through him. He knows their size difference is why they couldn’t work together on set, why he feels like he owes her his help over Star Destroyer feeling like they can’t send jobs her way because of one disastrous shoot. If he could help it, he’d do  _anything-_

She shifts her hips, pressing backwards to have him fill her from a new angle, and her mouth falls open. Nervously, he knocks his hair loose from the tie holding it back as he combs the fingers of his free through it; an old nervous habit. 

“Sorry,” spills out of his mouth, quietly so the mic doesn’t catch it. She shakes her head, cupping his hand inside her from the front. She wriggles on his fingers, breathless. 

He can hear it in the same pained tone from all those months ago, when she was just an amateur off the bus to LA;  _“too big-”_

“Its good,” she murmurs, and he hears it. The peace in her voice. He’s not actually hurting her. 

She  _likes_  it. Her hips shudder up and down his two fingers, her can feel her pussy clenching, absolutely _soaked._  

It’s not just the lube, Rey is wet, and he’s making her-

She bucks hard, her knees bending to push him deeper, but he notices the strain on her legs. 

“No, don’t do that,” he murmurs quietly. Gently, he presses upwards so she doesn’t have to go down, and Rey’s head falls back. “Go easy on your knees.”

He doesn’t believe what he does next; he kisses her bare shoulder. His hair covers his face, but it’s a solid appearance into her world; the commenters notice. But Rey is lost in pleasure, riding his hand greedily, heel of her own palm shoved over her mouth. 

He wishes he could help her along stroke the softness inside her, but it’s not something they’ve discussed and he’s not going to cross a line. He will be masturbating himself half to death tonight, but he’s not doing anything to ruin this now. 

But she needs something more, he can tell, her fingers now furiously stroking her clit as she bucks against his hand. 

“You’re doing amazing, Rey,” he murmurs, her own moans drowning the encouragement out to anyone else listening. 

At this, it’s like she breaks, her body hunching over, legs snapping together to holding his fingers inside, everything, everything trembling. Rey absolutely falls apart in a way that’s more raw than anything she’s done on camera, and Kylo is watching along with a hundred other people but he’s the only one who gets to see it  _this_  way.

He withdraws his hand when she lets it go, and Rey stumbles to face the camera, her face flushed and sweaty.

“That was for you, GoingForSnoke,” she says with a wink, and promptly shut the camera off without her usual twitter/patreon/ko-fi/paypal/posting schedule bit.

Ben is already rinsing off his hand in the kitchen sink, even though he just wants to lick his fingers clean, press them to her tongue, paint stripes of her wetness all over-

“Ben?”

He diligently retrieves her ice pack from the freezer. “Yeah?”

“Even without the $2,000, I… _we_  made triple what the usual stream does.” 

Her freckled cheeks are bright red. And this is the girl who didn’t bat an eyelash as he helped her research menstrual sponges so she could cam on her period. 

He hands her the ice, and still naked, she puts her knee brace back on, wincing as she flexes. She presses the pack to her knee with a sigh of relief.

“That’s nice,” Ben says, not meeting her eyes. “You must be hungry. You want In-N-Out?”

It was the normal ritual. She never ate before the show, so they got take out afterwards, but she was clearly trying to  _talk_  about it now.

He knows what this was about. It is a money thing. It is about lucrative business partnership starting to overwhelm genuine helpfulness. It is a lot of things, but it wasn’t about how he feels every time he looks at her. 

“Sure,” she replies, and he nods, dismissive, grabbing his keys. “You want extra fries? You earned them. You should probably rest on the couch until I get back.”

Rey, annoyed, obeys because her leg is cramping. But she goes over the data from the show, and can only come to one conclusion; the show was never as strong as it was with Ben as her partner, but it was three times as lucrative with Kylo involved. 


	2. half of my wardrobe is on your bedroom floor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has A LOT of unreliable Ben narration, so a lot of this is him not getting that Rey likes him the way he is and lapsing into who he thinks would be more successful with her. This will be addressed with Rey POV in later chapters, but I wasn't sure how alienating him thinking she doesn't care about him would be. Just you wait <3

_The girl was tied down to an interrogation table when he had met her. Her limbs writhed as he cut her clothes away, her eyes skimming the camera between each layer dropped like she knew she wasn't supposed to look at it but just kept looking a little too adjacent. Her limbs writhed in their binds, spindly and seductive, when Kylo brushed his rough fingers over his skin._

_Kylo didn't like to be that guy to treat this like more than it was, but he did get a pang of excitement when his mouth settled over one of her erect nipples. She pointed her mouth towards the boom mic hanging above them to let out a breathy moan._

_"You like it," he told her, and Rey attempted to close her legs even when his hand forced them from fully guarding her pussy from his examination. His fingers curved against her, coaxing inside her, and her body shook and her hips jerked towards his touch. "And I'll take it. I can take anything I want."_

_She rested back in her restraints with a look in her eyes; he wouldn't have everything. He never would. He wasn't strong enough to take her mentally, but physically, her wetness coated his hand._

_He pushed her knees open and licked her bare pussy. Her heels dug into the table, which was tilted to sit her upright for his attacks, to grind into his face. Her whole body struggled; either to push him away like her character would to to draw him in. He felt like he was water pouring out into her, filling her, his whole self arrowing into her sex and expanding in her womb. He liked sex, liked his job, but this was something deeper on principle. Rey fought against him in her mind in a way that very nearly mocked the point of this occurring between their bodies._

_"Show me," he bit her thigh, and her knee jerked up like she wanted to curl into herself but couldn't because of the binds holding her ankles open. He took the opportunity to slide a shoulder under her knee to open her up more. "Show me you want me. Show me everything."_

_He only remembered her first name, Rey Something, from the verbal consent portion of the shoot "I'm Rey ____ and I am consenting today to have sex on camera."_

_She was sunny and pretty and somewhat perfect, without the kind of pretentious slide of a girl who came to LA to be an actress. Rey was a hustler, he could tell, someone who could do the ugly thing to survive. There was an implication -in porn, in all sex work- that you do the ugly thing to yourself so you don't have to do it to other people._

_He did the ugly thing and it's what made him good at this; spanking, pushing for one more orgasm, thrusting roughly, taunting. In porn there was the pretty boy and then there was the man who did things like ravage. He usually worked with Phasma, who could take it and dish it out, but there wasn't much of a market in equals._

_She was the assembly of perfection; shiny hair, strong limbs, skinny with little tits, that made her average enough for this kind of thing. She looked innocent, so they paired her with him because that was what the world wanted to do with her innocence._

_They wanted it tied down and ruined._

Ben, still in a haze from Rey’s orgasm and with a moment of clarity one only experiences while leaving a girl’s apartment to get to his car, finally realizes what his problem is. 

He hasn’t owed Rey anymore for  _months._ He begged his way into her good graces and helped her build this camshow from the ground up. He was the one methodically watching other camgirls with her on her couch, laptop between them, taking notes and eating popcorn instead of...well, enjoying the show. He was the one helping with the tech side of it. He was the one helping with analytics and helping note positive trends to help build her brand. 

Rey was never going to be a porn star. He saw it clear on her face as he nudged his cock inside her on that set at Star Destroyer. Rey was going to wring this industry dry and walk out with her sanity, and he would die helping her. 

But that doesn't mean it's because of something he owed her. 

And even he can’t come to this conclusion on his own. He gets it, staring at his cell phone, because Rey called him and told him. 

He's stumbling down the concrete stairwell outside her apartment to the parking garage, his phone trembling in his pocket, and when he sees her name-

“Yeah?”

He tries not to sound breathless. 

“I don’t think I want In-N-Out.  _Noodles,"_ There's a sigh not unlike the one from her orgasm, _"_ I would like to eat an ungodly amount of noodles, if it’s all the same.”

“That place by the skate shop or the Thai place you went on that one bad date?”

“How dare you remind me of that night,” but there is a pregnant pause, “they did have  _amazing_  noodles.”

“Got it.” he pulls his keys out of his pocket, and he heard her laugh. 

“Ben, honestly.”

“What?”

“I just...” he hears her sigh, but not in the way he liked. “Tonight was a lot and I don’t want you to...don’t want you to feel like you need to do everything for me, you  _can_  say ‘no’ once in a while. For your own good.”

He can picture her on that couch. And hunching his shoulders, he tells her he would get her the noodles, and when he hangs up, that’s when the words hit. 

He’s drives the whole way to the restaurant obsessing over it. 

_He can’t say no to Rey._

He gets back from the Thai place and the door is unlocked like it always is. He walks into her living room and she’s on the couch, wearing one of his hoodies with a massive smile on her face. He kept finding his shit all over her apartment, even this room; books he brought to read for off time that never came, articles of clothing like jackets and sweaters, the empty cans of pretentious iced tea she mocked endlessly him for drinking.

It's like he's coming home to her, and this is the first time it's hitting him that it has gotten _this bad_. 

“Water’s ready for tea,” she informs him as he hands off the bag of food, he goes to the kettle and fills a mug with hot water like he does after every show. He breathes in the steam for a moment longer than he should. It's that numb feeling that none of this is really his, it just started to feel like that before he knew he was letting it. 

She doesn’t feel the need to fill the room with talking as she fumbles a carton open and twists the plastic fork into its contents like it’s spaghetti. But that's normal. They do a lot in silence, he likes that about her. He ties his hair back up, shuddering to remember how it got brought down. He watches her fork up the noodles while they hang out of her mouth like tentacles. 

His lips twitch with the almost-comment about how she refuses to learn to use chopsticks like he’s teased her a million times, but her words come back through the trance he’s been stuck in for the last hour and he realizes, another layer to this whole mess, that he’s in much deeper than he thought he was. 

Rey looks concerned, and again, he’s not the first to say it;

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“How,” there’s the scratch of her fork against the cardboard container, “how we tend to act like we’re dating even though we’re not?”

He tries not to look at her bare legs cross and uncross as she stretches across the couch. 

“I think it's the industry. Boundaries are hard, for, you know, _us._ I think we’re...good at kind of filling those emotional needs for each other. Until we find someone else. For now. I think we’re a good team.”

Rey cuts through bullshit, she always does;

“I just came on your fingers,” Rey’s sweaty hair is curling around her ears, “And you ran out of my apartment. I wish we could hit reset, if you’re going to take it this badly.”

“I’m not taking it badly.”

“You can’t even  _look_  at me.”

He finds she’s right; he can’t.

She sighs, and it’s the kind of relationship where they do something together so well that everything else precariously bolsters that one thing. Proximity. Friendship. Daily schedules. Routines. Her show is making money from their teamwork and they had put everything towards that happening.

There’s a lot that they did sloppily to protect this one thing. This one thing that was an accident, her returning finally his pleading emails to make it up to her after she exited set in tears, trying to make up for the fact that if he had hurt her-

He didn’t like to think about it. _Kylo_ did that; he was just following orders, he hadn't done anything in violation of his contract, he had stopped immediately when Rey safeworded. But it was still always on his mind, the person he accidentally hurt during a sex scene being naked in front of him with big toys inside her and men commenting on how they’d love to see her ruined, loved to see her hurt-

And with a glance at those comments, how now they’d like it to be by  _him._

Rey doesn’t push the conversation because they can’t; they stacked the partnership hastily on the  _“being cool with what happened at Star Destroyer”_ part of their relationship was before it was steady, and it made for an unsteady card tower of a partnership. 

He can’t because during the  _“establishing boundaries”_ portion he had been so desperate to make things up to her they built the partnership on  _“walking all over Ben.”_ He didn't blame her for not really respecting him. Ben never acted like he was worth respecting. 

She turns on the tv and they eat in silence. Sometimes Ben crashes on her couch. But not tonight. He goes home in that same numbness that carried him to the Thai place and back to her apartment. 

The next day he's Kylo; Kylo goes to the location where he and Phasma tie up a little brunette and make her orgasm until she's screaming and crying. The camera focuses on her red and exerted face. She smiles at him by the make-up table where they cover up one of her tattoos because _production wants her to look like a virgin._ She rests her brow on his shoulder when cameras are resetting, despite screeching like a banshee when his cock filled her up. She laughs at Phasma's jokes afterwards, everyone toweling off. He feels nothing close to what he feels for Rey. 

Everyone can turn it on and off. It's the industry. Rey riding his fingers last night. Phasma as his scene partner for 80% of his work at Star Destroyer despite how they can barely stomach a cup of coffee together. Mila joking about her girlfriend's birthday minutes before she sucks his cock. 

Maybe he isn't as good at this as he thought; if he wants every little piece of Rey he can get, that it's not enough, that he needs to fucking _own_ her. That's Kylo. Kylo takes what he fucking wants. Ben shuttles around take out and dries the sweat off a girl who has to fuck herself in front of him. 

Now that he knows this about himself, it’s killing him. 

He watches her tight little nipples during her next show, her body nearly split by the dildo she eases in and out, her back expertly arched to display her pussy instead of stimulate anywhere pleasurable. He’s done this a thousand times. Sometimes he moves lamps when she does this, to adjust the way the lighting hit her to optimize the shadows of her curves. Sometimes he noted how much she was sweating and got her a water. Usually he just watched the chat, banned guys who crossed the line in the comments. He was always _helpful._

Ben is useless today, pacing her apartment, wandering, trying not to grumble. Rey knows it too. She rolls onto her knees, taking herself from behind so she’s facing away from the camera. 

“You’re making  _me_  anxious,” she mouths at him, and he hesitates in the doorway. She keeps going, barking out practiced moans and lifting her ass up to display the point of entry to the webcam. It's so clinical to her at this point. 

He moves to a light to try and get it at a better angle; then he flinches at the sound of her moaning _"So big,"_ for the benefit of her viewers needing to know _"How big is it?"_ now that the toy is vanishing snugly inside her. He drops the bottled water in his hands, Rey freezes on camera. 

"Just my cat knocking some shit over," she says to the camera with a smile.

He's kicking himself as he picks the bottle back up.

_Why the fuck was he helping her during her solo masturbation shows? The whole point of those was she could handle them alone-_

He shrugs off her confused expression as he walks out of the room.

Ben waits in the living room, giving her the space to end the show without him hovering and making her anxious. She towels off she she exits the camroom, clinging to the fabric as she stares at him. She's naked, she's vulnerable-

_She's always this way after a show, and if you were a man you wouldn't be thinking about her like that._

"Ben," she reaches for his hand.

He wants to touch it, but she's not even dressed yet, he doesn't know that if he starts if he'll ever stop. He rubs his useless hands anxiously up and down his jean-clad thighs. He always hated being Ben. Ben was himself in high school; too scared to ask someone to prom, hiding out in the art room or at karate practice, becoming too much of a douchebag on various toxic websites. Kylo was the one who could talk to a girl, who could be a man when it was needed, who could take what he wanted.

"They're all clamoring for Kylo," she says lightly, shyly. "We might-"

But there's nothing she has to say, she just looks at him.

He's so fucking jealous of Kylo. He wishes he could be that for her, but the last time he was, he hurt her. 

"Do you trust me?"

She tilts her head and sighs. 

 _"Yes,_ Ben."

_"All these shows have these Daddy Kinks now," Rey wrinkled her nose as she stuffed some popcorn in her face. Ben laughed, she was really snuggled too close to be doing that to him, examining the girl with a cat ear headband onscreen. He was glad the laptop was covering his groin._

_"It's an added thing, like a lifestyle, ownership thing. I think half these girls make it up, to seem desirable, or possessed, or something. He's just this guy they accredit all their new stuff to, like "Daddy bought me this new toy!""_

_"Collared like animals," Rey wrinkled her nose._

_"Some people like to relinquish control."_

_"I get a pair of handcuffs, I'm talking about-"_

"I had an idea," he says quietly, "About the third show of the week."

He's been thinking about this, and that night, all day. The way to understand this. The way to be both. 

Rey nods, breathes quietly. 

"I'll participate in the show..."

"I'm glad," she reaches for him, but he pulls away. Her hand lands on his shoulder, and he holds it steady so he can keep going.

"I'll use...you know, the BDSM stuff. Toys and things. Not hardcore, but like orgasm control, restraints, discipline. Just for the presence of it, they like a man involved occasionally."

Poe Dameron did a stream with her as a favor, but it was mostly them giggling and answering comment questions because they were uncontrollably silly when put in a room together. Something sexual _must_ have happened during those two hours, but Ben can't even remember it because of the friendly vibe in the room while he worked the technical side of the stream. He wasn't even jealous during, let alone trying to scrub his brain for the image of Rey sucking Poe's dick and laughing at some goofy accent Poe did. Now, it makes him furious that he was enough of an idiot to sit there and let it happen. That he introduced her to Phasma and filmed them together. That he researched toys to fill that sweet little pussy instead of his cock.

The audience she had amassed through her charm, intelligence, and strength had loved a lot of the choices he helped make with her. He trusted this one. Because Ben had nothing to do with it.

Rey's chin tilts towards her chest as she look down at his, hands gripping the towel. He could lean forward and kiss her naked breast if he felt like it. 

He has to say no, just this once. Or he never will.

"But I'm not showing my face," he adds, "And no penetration. You will belong to yourself."

Rey's eyes glint at the topic they haven't spoken of since she firmly insist he put it behind them, or else he'd be apologizing every day.

"What do you get out of it?"

He sighs, and rests his head on her bare belly. She drops the towel behind her and combs her fingers into his hair. 

He feels Rey shaking under his hands.

It's everything, actually. That he knows everything he can do but never cross the line. To eliminate his needs. 

He remembers Mila's red face, begging him as Phasma spanked her, to just let her come. 

"Ben," her voice sounds pleading, "Can we please talk about last night? Can we talk about what happened to us?"

He remembers the satisfaction of getting to say no. 

Kylo says no.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today I had an Anti flip out at me for relating a Fun Home quote to Ben's childhood, calling me homophobic (bisexual woman here but kay thanks), and then I checked their profile and turns out they work for Chik Fil A. Which like, fine, but come on, we're not exactly in a place to throw stones here.
> 
> They also gave me the iconic smug quote "I don't hate Reylos, I pity them" despite behaving hatefully but needing to frame themselves in this socially conscious place of authority, but you know, Chik Fil A. Saintly behavior.
> 
> Anyway, leave a comment below with your favorite Anti story. Rey POV and some backstory to come!


	3. summer slipped us underneath her tongue

The next day comes with express orders; Ben is kicking her out of her apartment. 

“Take a day off. No comments, no checking your site, no obsessing. Do something without any of that and come back here at five sharp.”

He’s not usually an 'orders' guy with her. He’s not even smug about it, he’s barely looking at her. He’s usually a “How about” or a “Generally we use this lens but if you want to have more of a squared off frame” or “Yes Rey, noodles Rey, whatever you want.”

Rey has been trying to get him push back, just once, for months. The  _owing_  of the whole relationship has felt like she has had no traction; nothing has consequences because he tolerates her because he owes her. It’s like trying to swim, kicking in some futile manner, through marshmallow fluff and just sinking to the bottom with no resistence. 

“This is  _my_  apartment,” she nudges a mug of coffee towards him. He shakes his head. He was getting awfully good at that  _‘no’_  thing, since she offered him that advice. Rey doesn’t know what to do with the extra cup, so she drains it down the sink. To be fair, his hands are twitching enough already. He probably doesn't need it.

"You respond differently when you're stir crazy." He shrugs, his tone analytical. Rey wishes she poured that hot coffee in his lap.

“Do you trust me?” he asks again, and she nods. 

“On a base level, professionally, yes. Even when things went wrong-” she held up a hand to stop him from interrupting, “You respected when I said no. You  _stopped_  when I said no. I trust that because you showed me already.”

He’s quiet a minute, his hair up and he’s wearing the glasses he does when he needs to focus without his contacts irritating him. Clearly he has work planned for today. 

She adores Glasses Ben, it offers a contrast to the bare Grecian profile of Kylo. He wears them when he’s working with her, but never when he’s working at Star Destroyer. 

“Go surfing,” he says after a moment of silence. “It relaxes you.”

She smirks at him. “Do I need to be relaxed?”

His answer is blunt;

“Yes.”

Rey doesn’t get out on her board because of her knee, but she does go to the beach and jump in the waves for the afternoon, letting them toss her to shore in the fizzy weightlessness of the tide. It’s weird, the things she usually does to numb her body on the days she has shows; working out, yoga, fueling it with caffeine and curling up tight on her couch seem like isolating herself from her body. A choice she makes for the side of her that cams. The sensation of sand and warmth from the sun and the lightness of the water are all bringing her back, focusing her on the nerves she’s been trying to dull for all these months. 

Ben’s only other words to her are a text instructing her to remember sunscreen before arriving at the beach; it doesn’t seem like a friendly instruction. She lathers up as soon as she gets out of her car. The smell every time she turns her head makes her think of him, and her growing curiosity. Ben’s made suggestions before, but it was building off of the direction she was going; a better toy to use, a better way to style the scenario she was going for, the way to structure the usual show. 

The farthest he’s ever gone, like she’s not thinking about this every ten minutes since it happened, was the day she was grinding against a hitachi in her weekly masturbation hour and he reached for her off-camera ankle and yanked her legs farther apart to get the right shot. 

It was a knowing touch, the only sign that this guy fucked for a living. Efficient, even slightly chiding. Dominating.

It was the combination of things; the length of time she had spent in that position, the feeling of isolation that people on the chat could give her being broken by the touch of a real human being she actually liked, the frustration of knowing she had to cum at some point, or the fact that his tiny but forceful movement actually made it feel  _better._

That yank set off the only time she _really_ came on camera. Until the other night. Sure, there were flutters, if you hold a vibrator there long enough something _will happen,_ but it never felt like a sexual orgasm. It was her body reacting to stimuli. It wasn't sex, it was work involving her vagina. It was as sexy as a pap smear. 

“I  _love_  camming,” one girl from the industry Ben had introduced her to for questions when she was getting started. “It's so empowering. I never feel as much like myself as I do on camera.”

Which to Rey, was like hearing a McDonalds employee say  _“I love working in a drive through. I am never myself the way I am when I’m forcing myself to be nicer than I am to ungrateful assholes over a headset.”_

Sometimes she owned it. Sometimes she knew she looked good, the angle made her body displayed in all the right ways, she said something funny; she was allowed to be herself. Her kink was in the deprivation, in the knowledge she would never actually fuck these guys. That's empowering. She would take their money, she was working hard so she didn't have to wait for her life to start anymore. But it was just a glimmer, and she’d go to bed with her knee screaming in pain, her pussy swollen and aching, or trying to masturbate for _herself_ and feeling tapped out. There’s such thing as a good kind of sore, but it usually comes from someone pushing your limits; not you pushing your own limits for someone else, and in her case, all of them strangers. 

But Ben yanking her legs open with a hand tight around her ankle, head tilted down to his own iPad screen like nothing happened, had startled a sense of pleasure out of her that she was so willing to reclaim, she’d even do it on camera. She’d give that part of herself. It was what was making her enjoy the show; Ben watching it. It woke up her healthy sex drive in real life. She got off with just her hand, no toys, so many nights just imagining Ben ripping her legs open and watching. It’s why when the commenters really wanted to see it, she didn’t shut it down, just grab the stuffed porg and grind against it while dirty-talking her offscreen partner to play on the voyeurism to steer away from the touching. She let it happen. He...

He didn’t say no, but Ben never said no. 

She gets back to the apartment at five, sun kissed and pleasantly full from a taco truck she stopped by on the way home. She offers him a cardboard boat full of shrimp, corn, and cilantro but he waves it off. It seems like he’s not allowing her to take care of him at all, a habit she hates to admit she adores. He usually tolerates her fussing like an angry teenager; picking leaves out of his hair, dropping baked goods into his arms, telling him to get more sleep. He doesn’t reject it, she’s even seen him adjust his expectations to it. He’s less guarded around her. She usually could even spit on the food she offered him and he would eat it without even looking up from what he was doing, like a rabbit. Not that she would, but she loved watching him trust her that much. 

“I hope you’re not too worn out,” he says simply. There’s a black bag next to him. She wants to see what’s in it. He makes no offer to display its contents.

“Comfortable,” she says, “I just played in the water for the afternoon.”

He nods, there’s the grace of a small smile. She lights up. He was stingy with those. 

“Alright, if you could take a shower, rinse off all the sand and salt.”

“Should I do my hair?”

Camera-ready meant a lot of careful effort to look careless. Shiny, styled hair that was casually falling down her shoulders, make-up to hide she needed make-up, an attempt to not show any cuts or bruises unless administered onscreen. 

Ben shakes his head. “Your hair can still be wet. For make-up, just your usual base. Do that later, though. Come right back.”

She showers off, and even though he’s seen her naked a million times she tugs on a soft, oversized t-shirt and panties to exit the bathroom.

Rey returns to her living room, she stifles a yawn. He nods, as though something he expected had happened.

“Tired?”

“Sun wears me out,” she admits, as if he didn’t already know that she kept beach days for when she wasn’t camming that night for that very reason.

He motions towards the couch, “Take a quick nap.”

It’s not an offer. The warm water and the lingering heat on her skin from the sun are hugging her tight, and his voice is soft and suggestive. 

“Bossy” she murmurs. He nods.

“I’m...I’m not doing this unless you’re in the right frame of mind.”

“God, Ben, what are you doing to me?”

He focuses on the iPad in front of him. “We’re discussing it when you wake up. Just a quick rest. Forty minutes.”

He casts a cautious look at her face. “We’re starting small,” he promises, “I’m not...that won’t ever happen again.”

She curls up on the couch and realizes how every hour awake after the day she spent at the beach was going to be  _torture._  Her show is at ten, she was slipping into dreams when it was not even six yet. 

She dreams of surfing, oddly enough. The idle time, when the waves aren’t in yet. Her ass settled against the board with her legs hanging into the water. The water rocks her rhythmically, like she can still feel that phantom tide pulling at her legs like she does whenever she spends too long in the ocean.

It’s a free feeling, a warm one. She arches her back to enjoy the sun, her thighs clenching pleasantly around what’s holding her up in the water. 

In the dream, when she looks down, Ben is slithering underneath her, replacing the board, holding her afloat as she straddles his waist. They float like that in silence, the sun shining on his wet hair with the depth of the ocean below him. 

She tries to find his cock with her body, seeking it with a rock of her hips that mimics that of the sea, but he holds her over his torso, resisting.

She feels it in her inner muscles contracting, the want there, the arousal, and it’s so deep she can’t sleep through it anymore. 

When she wakes up, Ben has cleared out some of the clutter of her set that added to the “quirky girl you’d just love as your perfect girlfriend” vibe they were going for. 

“Better?” he says, somehow sensing she was awake without even looking at her. 

“Yeah,” she admits. There’s a glass of water on the coffee table. She lifts it to her lips. She tries to rise on shaky legs. There’s no easy way to say  _“I just had the weirdest sex dream about you.”_

So she doesn’t. 

He motions for her to stay on the couch. From the position of the sun, it's been a lot more than forty minutes.

She hesitates; camspace is camspace, it is better left separate from  _livable_ space. Those worlds could overtake each other when intersected. 

“We’re not filming until later,” he informs her, not yielding that she should sit down, “this is for us working together.”

Hesitantly, she sits up on the couch. She feels it, the result of the dream, she's wet and warm on the inside and it drips down her thighs. He adjusts the camera set up, a low angle so clearly she’s not getting any higher than on her knees tonight, before joining her. He keeps a safe distance. 

“Your safeword is Falcon.” 

She wrinkles her nose; that’s the car she bought off of his father last winter when he was in town and she charmed him with her appreciation of the engine mechanics. 

“Turn and face me.”

She hesitates again, he nudges her knee with the backs of two fingers. 

“I’m not going to touch you again until the camera is on.”

She nods, obeys again. 

“There’s a study...” he seems to hate this way of attacking what he’s doing, so he shakes his head.  _“Four minutes of eye contact.”_

“What?”

“It’s an intimacy thing. Four minutes of eye contact. It builds trust and intimacy between people, there's been some pop psychology social experiments with it. There’s a video-”

She shakes her head. “Ben, I trust you.”

“We’re doing this the way I tell you, or we’re not doing this at all. You can do it all without me,” his voice softens, “I know you can. So please try.”

Rey sighs and blinks a few times, straightening up like she’s being tested. Ben takes a deep breath and faces her fully. There’s not a lot of room for him to sit in lotus position like she is, he rests one knee towards the back of the couch and one on the floor, opening up enough to face her head-on with his back against the armrest. 

He touches the screen of his phone gracefully and sets it down on the coffee table. 

“Ready?”

She huffs out a laugh. “Can I talk?”

“You’re not banned from talking, but it’s not supposed to about the conversation we have during. Just the looking.”

He’s so serious. So genuine in his belief that they need to do this. She wants to laugh at the absurdity; not one of her viewers is looking for  _lots of eye contact and feeling_  in their porn.

“Fine.”

He starts the timer. 

It’s the longest four minutes of her life. She can’t help flickering around his face, twisting her own up in suppressed laughter, or focusing on just  _above_  his eyes because this is intense. He doesn’t touch her. He just looks. 

Once, soothingly, he tells her to focus. He uses her name, and it’s kind of like a trance. She sobers and looks into his eyes. She realizes Ben hasn't done this with her, either. He was really shy in the beginning, despite offering to help her with a camshow. This is new to him too, and she likes the openness she sees in his dark eyes.

Rey clears her throat.

“Are you nervous?” he perceives from the fidgeting. He’s not wrong. He is making her very nervous. It's like he's easing her inside of him while also falling inside of her himself. She can't look away, but the knowledge that he's looking-

It's like he knows. Her thighs clench, the wetness pooling out of her. 

She doesn't know what he's going to do to her, but she's never wanted it so bad. His eyes are nudging her to ask questions.

"Do you always cum when you're filming at Star Destroyer?" she asks quietly. 

His mouth tightens. "Yes," his voice is gravelly. "But it's a different kind of orgasm."

She knows exactly what he means. 

When the timer goes off, she doesn't want to look away. 

"What is your safeword?"

"Falcon."

"Don't be afraid to use it. Now go do your make-up,” he instructs quietly.

“Are we role-playing?”

He looks at her like he would never accept anything but herself, and that she tried to offer something else. “No.”

“Are you putting a collar on me?”

“Highly doubt I’ve earned that yet,” he answers vaguely with a sip of iced tea. He sets the can down on her bookshelf. She raises her eyebrows. 

“We’re starting  _small,”_  he insists. He reaches into the black bag. 

In his palm is a little silver bullet vibrator. It had a wire attached to a remote with a good amount of distance for whoever was using it. 

"What do you plan to do with that?"

"It has a few settings," he offers her a view of the remote. She bends close, breathless. "This is the lowest."

She feels it against her hand and her cunt clenches greedily. 

"This is the highest."

Her heart races to the frantic pace of the toy.

"You're going to lay down with your hands tied over your head and I'm going to play with those settings to make you cum. And how many times is up to me. Maybe it'll be more than you can handle. Maybe it won't be enough."

"So I have my safeword for if it's too much?"

She's a little insulted by the implication.

He nods, but there's a rare humor in his eyes, because he knows she would be insulted, and the secret in his eyes between them warms her chest and may put her at a risk of being _noticeably_ wet through her panties. But that's been a concern for a while now. Her cunt is clenching down on nothing, a devouring arousal. He's gotten her started but this is going to be explosive once he touches her. 

"But you have to trust me, first, that you know that I won't do anything to you that you can't handle."

She nods. She realizes they haven't really stopped looking into each other's eyes, save for a glance at the toy in his hand.

"Now go do your make-up. I changed my mind. Dark eyeliner, mascara. I want to see it run down your face when I make you cum."

Rey shivers, her hands shaking as she applies the liner when she's alone in the bathroom. She wants to touch herself so bad. 

"What should I wear?"

"Either you can be naked already or a sundress that opens at the front. I don't want to have to tie you after the stream starts."

She opts for naked, so she keeps the t shirt on. 

She feels like she's in a trance until the show starts. There's a lot of fidgeting, a lot of nervy arousal that Ben pointedly ignores. The deprivation just adds to the edge. She paces. 

He summons her about fifteen minutes before they're going to stream, where she's close to ordering him to call it all off and fuck her on the kitchen floor. 

"Aftercare," he begins, focused on what he's doing. "Is important. You typically shower off after the show, is it invasive if I'm there supporting you?"

"Really?"

He looks down at the floor. "There can be an emotional drop that could be traumatic if you just get _left_ in that emotional state, I don't want to make you uncomfortable I'm just trying to be-"

"No," she interrupts, and he looks at her. "I...get it. I know what it is. I like cuddling, after. When it's intense, I like to feel affectionate."

His eyes are warm. "Do you need that from me?"

She needs _everything_ from him in that moment. His nostrils flare when she nods. 

"I can do that."

It's time, she can't keep it off forever. It's a schedule, time to clock in. But she's more emotionally raw than she's ever been on camera, always in control of this tempered joy that made her good at this. 

"On your back," he tells her as she gets ready. She chugs some water and complies. "I don't want you stressing your knee tonight."

_What a sweet dom._

He ties her hands with a soft length of rope from his bag; it's so expert and efficient she can't stop watching him.

He places the vibrator in her palm. "Please put this inside you."

Rey obeys, her cunt squeezing down on the intrusion with so much need she almost cums from just that.

"Hands over your head," when she does he lifts and slips the leg of a nearby table through the "O" formed by her arms so she can't lower them. She's pinned.

"What's your safeword?" he asks one final time as he adjusts the camera again with her in frame. 

"Falcon," she says again. 

He holds up a sheet of paper offscreen. She squints, immediately nervous, as he points to the words to read. 

And the stream begins with her on her back, wire extending out of her body, only Kylo's knee visible on camera. She looks up at him, helpless, because he is _Kylo_ now. 

"Hey everyone," she smiles but her breath labors her words; "Kylo's back by popular demand. We're going to play a game. I've got a toy inside me, he's got the remote. He will be taking suggestions from the chat about what to do with it."

His hand shows the remote settings to the camera.

There's a tidal wave of _"All the way up"_ and Rey falls flat on her back as Kylo complies. Her hips arch up and she's already cumming so hard, so worked up, so fucking ready. There's no foreplay; and yet Ben gave her all the foreplay in the world. 

The twitch of the toy inside her, pulsing snugly against her g-spot, is going to kill her. 

She squeezes her thighs closed, her knees to her chest. It's the only thing she can move, with her arms jerking in their restraints. She can't protect herself, she has to trust him. 

"Did you cum already?"

It's a cruel question, one that beads tears in her eyes.

_"Yes."_

"I think you did more than once, baby."

He smirks down at her. 

She only has a moment in her to ponder the presence of this _baby_ nickname before her stomach muscles contract again.

The buzzing inside her lessens, but the orgasms keep happening in a steady roll. Her thighs are trembling. He's turned it down, thank god. She couldn't take much more. "I think we can make you wait for the next one."

 _"Uhh,"_ slides out of her mouth inarticulately. The pulse of the vibrator slides down in intensity until she feels an itch of sensation but not enough to be satisfied. She rides the toy inside her, lifting her hips again for some kind of satisfaction, and Kylo chuckles darkly. 

"No, good girl, not yet. Someone just paid $200 for you to have to wait ten minutes until you can cum again." 

Rey groans helplessly. He strokes the arch of her foot as a show of comfort. It's the only time she's felt his touch, and her foot jerks, her whole body seizing. "Unless someone wants to top that bet to just let her cum. We can make this interesting."

 _"Please someone do that,"_ she hisses between clenched teeth.

Kylo laughs. "You heard our girl here."

There's bickering in the comments, Kylo moderating with a soft, dulcet tone. "I think they don't like the way you begged, baby. If you really beg, maybe someone will help you."

"Kylo," she barks out, jagged, riding on nothing, hips jacked up off the floor. 

"Don't ask me, ask _them,"_ she feels his breath brush her inner thigh. Her arms strain against the ropes binding her. _"I can always say no."_

 _"Please,"_ she groans, the tendons of her neck straining, "please, let me cum."

His soft voice works her through the next few minutes, whether they are ten or not is never revealed to her, if someone ever bailed her out. Then he cranks the remote to a medium and she comes so hard she can feel the sweat coating her body. 

"Very good," he soothes, she's so close to shrieking at this point. This is so much more intense than she had bargained, especially when he spent the better part of the last few hours immersing her in this, getting her ready even when she didn't know it yet.

The vibrator goes still, and she screams in frustration, her back arching to the sound of Kylo's laugh. She's close to sobbing, her stomach tensing up in anticipation, her toes curled. _"Please, no, please please please,"_ she rushes out, and a faint buzzing sound has her relaxing back against the floor. 

"You're so wet, baby, I think you like to be teased."

She shakes her head desperately, and as one orgasm starts rolling into another, she realizes he's right and he knows it. 

It all starts to blur. Kylo announces another generous viewer wants her to be left on high for another ten minutes. Kylo does for five, then judging by the pitch of her sounds, secretly cranks it down and lets her ride it out on just performance, which is a richer moan because now it's at just the right speed. She nudges his hip with her foot to let him know she noticed, he strokes his thumb along the ball of her foot this time to remind her she can trust him to know what she needs. 

At one point Kylo calls her his good girl again, tugging on the wire extending out of her body so the vibe nudges her entrance from the inside, than releases it so her own inner muscles suck it right back deep. This is so absurd, the number of vaginal orgasms she's had, the fact that she could lose count without him ever touching her clit. 

She wants his hands. She wants his mouth. She wants his cock. It's all she can do not to break character and beg for them. 

She thinks this is going to last forever, but Kylo manages the time well; she only rests bonelessly against the floor for a few minutes in surrender when the vibration ceases and she can barely comprehend him saying something as a goodbye. 

It's over. The camera is off. She has a million questions. She wants to know why she feels so good. 

She's not sure who she's looking at as he crawls to her side, bent over her body so gently. 

"We made _so much money,"_ he reassures her, stroking her hair out of her face. "You did such a good job, baby."

Ben breaks the seal of emotions she's struggling to hold at bay. He tenderly places his hand on the flat plane of her stomach and leans down to whisper in her ear;

_"What did you dream about?"_


	4. I am your sweetheart, psychopathic crush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, I know we all love our fantasies and the "vicarious empowered sex worker" is a valid and important narrative for a lot of individuals successfully supporting themselves through the industry; which is why I included characters like Phasma and Mila. This is also a story about the personal intimacy between Rey and Ben and how that has been compromised by their specific experience; I say this because I'm a person who has done a lot of research into sex work in this country in the past five years and I don't want to issue a condemnation to anyone involved. So there are some "dark sides of the porn industry" takes in here that I try to keep measured to personal experiences. There will be more on the undamaged, un-compromised sexy side of things in later chapters, but I figured I'd disclaim that while there are negatives to the industry and it does take a certain type of person that Rey and Ben may be finding out they are not, there is no shame in success and happiness from sex work. 
> 
> On that note; aftercare chapter!

“S-standing’s going to be a problem,” she mumbles clumsily. Ben startles and hands her a bottle of water. Rey has maybe the worst case of cotton-mouth she’s ever had, but she may have sweated all the fluids out of her body. 

“It may take a while to feel normal,” he says quietly, but it’s half-aware, like he’s examining her as he offers comfort. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you at all?”

Rey shakes her head, realizing she feels so weird and noodle-y is because her arms are free. He must have done that after he turned off the cameras, because she didn’t remember him untying her. 

She feels the floor against her knees more than she’s ever really thought about the floor being there. Trying to stand up is, as she put it, a problem. 

One he clearly has a solution for; he just picks her up. 

“Okay, this is a little much,” she grunts, but her body curls into his arms more readily than her mind does. She can feel his heartbeat, and despite being fucked out of her mind she feels touch-starved and presses her chest to his heart, her body small enough to really nuzzle it to her breast. Her chin notches over his shoulder. He takes it better than expected, as one of the least touchy-feely people she knows, especially in porn. He must expect this. She had said  _cuddling._  

Ben is super calm and measured; she’s not sure if she’s still dealing with Kylo or not. 

“Bath, then?” he reasons, and it sounds so much better than trying to stand on her colt-legs, so she nods. She ties her hair up in a bun with an elastic found on the sink as he runs the bath. 

Her voice flies out; defensive. 

_“I can-”_

“I know you can,” he squeezes a generous amount of bubble bath into the tub. His smile up at her is reassuring. “That’s why it’s call after _care, not after-Rey-has-to-do-all-the-work.”_

She lifts herself onto the sink counter. He catches her stealing a glance at herself over her shoulder in the mirror; he was right, she does look  _wrecked_. It’s a good illusion, the dark eye makeup running down her face. Clever, a way of not having to mess her up that much but making what happened look more aggressive. 

She points her toes towards the tub he’s filling.

“They teach you all this at Star Destroyer?”

He’s quiet while he tests the temperature of the bath, then messes with the faucet to alter the warmth. “No.”

She thinks he’ll leave it at that, but he clears his throat.

“Not officially. Some people will talk about their needs with their partner. There’s a lot of cuddling because you have to be comfortable with each other physically very quickly. Phasma never wanted me involved in that process but she’s a switch and I think that’s what makes it easier for her. Usually someone on set will check on submissives after the shoot but there’s no promise of that, and well, after what happened with you-”

Rey had walked. Rey didn’t even give them ten minutes to reset, going to bitch about what happened with the person fixing her make up and having a smoke like most girls did. Rey walked off set and when her contract was threatened because she didn’t want to work with their most bankable lead she was fired and all but explicitly blacklisted from the industry. Rey took about four inches of his thick cock inside her and looked like she was going to spit in his face; safeworded, demanded the director cut, and walked away. 

“I don’t care about the contract,” he had overheard her voice from the phone in Hux’s office, “It  _hurt._  I’m not doing that again.”

Hux had snorted, catching Kylo watching from the hallway and getting up to close the door. The last thing he heard was; “If  _that_  hurt you, you won’t last long in this business.”

He knew about that stuff. But he didn’t know who had cuddled her the way she needed, who helped her bathe after that disaster, who was caring for her. 

Porn wasn’t about pleasure for him. Not from his side of the camera. It was work. But he never viewed the indignities that he was spared from too closely.

Some girls got a round of applause from the crew after a particularly brutal shoot; it was customary but also kind of condescending to have a lighting guy give you a gold star for doing just as much for the shot as he did. The girls were typically emotionally raw and waving off the attention, feeling like they had to smile and make everyone feel better about what they had just put her through. 

Phasma put an end to it on her part very early on in her career;  _“Never do that shit to me again,”_ she said of the standing ovation, her face flushed with exertion; not so much a blush but the red glow of someone after a crossfit session. They never liked each other, but Kylo worked with her because he respected her. 

This is stuff he never learned before Rey, stuff he assumed someone in charge was handling and aware of and everything was being taken care of. And when he was walking through the parking lot with a random blonde-19-year old he had never seen before crying in her car after a scene she had done, he kept walking. He was in Kylo mode; he assumed it was whatever led her to the business, or that the business did not suit her. 

Rey walking had changed his wiring; nothing he could say could get her back on that set, so he watched her build her own. She amazed him. 

He researched all of this painstakingly for her because he was ashamed of his mistakes. 

She had drunkenly, over noodles, tried to explain her side of the incident; but he had tensed up and they left it alone. He rolled the quote from that night around in his mind until it wore smooth like a stone in the ocean:

_“It wasn’t all you. Part of it was the angle, you know, to film it going in and out as violently as possible. The director fucked up. But you’re too big for me, I mean, look at us. It’s not your fault. You’d never fit in there.”_

He swallowed his pride to prevent mentioning that he’d been paired with girls smaller than her. Excuses felt lame when a girl was telling him  _no._  Rey was tight, something the industry was going to change (not much, years of working with Phasma it still felt the same inside her and after all there’s muscles involved  _but still_ ) and contradicting her felt like being that kid that finds a butterfly and is so excited he crushes it in his hand. 

The rejection was clear; her only needed implication that they were incompatible and it would never work. 

“I researched this for you,” he finishes lamely.

Rey lifts her knees to her chest and winces once her position changes. 

“Sore?”

She nods. “Now’s not the best time to talk about...I’m a little lightheaded.”

“Drink your water.”

As she sips, he lifts her back up and helps her into the tub. He runs the faucet to fill a cup of water to rinse through her hair; she showered earlier so her hair is still pretty clean but it prevents having to rinse with the bathwater filled with her sweat. He crouches down by the side of the tub, Rey smiles because he’s obviously taking the seriously.

“You smell good,” he tells her, and she laughs, head rested against the edge of the tub. His fingers stroke through her wet hair. 

“I feel gross. Like a good gross. Like when you’re a kid and you play in the mud and just get covered in it head to toe.”

He makes a face. She laughs again. “You never played in the mud as a kid?”

He swipes some of the suds across her cheek with his thumb. 

“I was a clean kid, I guess. I mostly read books in my room. Played with action figures. Inside stuff.”

“I wish I could picture you as a kid.”

He shrugs. “I tend to overwhelm the past version of myself.”

She rests her head back and takes a deep breath. Her legs shift underwater. 

“Are you hungry?”

She shrugs, “That’s not important right now. I’ll scrounge something up.”

“I can-”

“Ben,” she strokes his hair with her wet fingers. “I want-”

She wants to be touched, he can tell. She’s grabby, a little bratty with her questions. Her eye contact is direct an slightly challenging, flickering away when he’s looking but catching back and knowing when she knows he’s chasing her gaze. Ignoring his inquiry about her dream  _(she was whimpering on the couch as she slept)_  so to get an answer he would have to make her. Sometimes with a submissive, the brat side can come out for scolding or a good spank. He doesn’t know if Rey knows this, he just knows she wants  _more,_  a dangerous amount, and something he’s not sure he can give without totally losing himself. 

“Still sore?”

Her cheeks are flushed from the steam of the hot water. She licks her lips. 

“I want...my clit feels, I don’t know, weird.”

Her brow furrows, and he wants to kiss every inch of her expressive face. But this is not about him losing control. If he does, he compromises her trust.

“It was all internal stimulation, so yes, it would feel neglected. It was protruding from its hood during most of the session so you were  _really_  aroused.”

“You...saw it?”

He laughs at her shock for only a breath, casting her a knowing look. Her eyes are dark. “Yes, Rey.”

He’s not calling her ‘baby’ and she sort of appreciates that that name has its space and this is about her. She likes it, but just when it’s not ruined by overkill. 

“I’m,” she covers her face with her hands. He strokes the soft skin behind her ear and she fidgets because it feels really good. “There’s never usually someone...seeing something that no one else sees when I’m doing that. I mean, you get a different angle, but...”

“I understand.” 

His hand dips under the water, stroking her thigh. Her breath stutters and she opens herself up.

“Details,” she finishes breathily, “That I’m only showing you. I don’t know why I never saw it that way before.”

He keeps his tone casual when she raises her knees out of the water to try and coax him to touch her pussy.

“You can’t, after all that, Rey...”

“Please,” she whispers, her lips so close to his face. Her back arches, tits rising out of the water; slick and tight. “Touching...for after. I want touching.”

Rey is a smart girl, she knows this, and a capable person, but something about her arousal shelves all that and still it feels shockingly good. Maybe because of it, it feels good. That someone else is in control.

But she’s the one who urged his hand between her legs, the one who asked him to help with the show. Wasn’t she in control this whole time?

“What kind of touching?”

She groans, he face falling into the crook of his neck. He puts his far arm around her shoulders, the other dipped into the water and stroking higher up her thigh. She does feel cared for, and it feels amazing. Maybe too intimate. His face was hovering over her pussy and hour ago, and yet-

This is almost too much for her. 

“My clit,” she whimpers, her lips moving across his skin. He swallows and parts her folds with his thumb, rubbing experimentally. He finds her clit quickly, it’s hard and needy, and she lets out a little mew at the contact. 

“I saw how red your little clit was with that toy in your cunt, I know you need it.”

She sinks lower into the tub, pressing against his hand with her eyes furrowed shut.

“I saw  _everything,_  Rey.”

That's the sexiest promise she's ever heard. Right now, her mind flickers to him, kneeling between her feet, managing her pleasure so well. 

“Mhmm,” she sighs, chewing her lip as he strokes her little nub. Her sore muscles are spasming but she can’t imagine him stopping. 

Her leg flashes out of the water, hooking her ankle up on the edge of the tub to open her thighs properly to welcome his strokes. Strands of hair escape the bun, slicking to her neck and cheeks. 

He takes deep breaths, focusing on her, trying to ignore how hard he is. This isn’t about him, this is about being in control of himself. 

It’s a weak orgasm, mostly because she’s burned out and this is more about her getting attention. But even though it’s small, she doesn’t hide any of her sounds, she accepts his touch limply instead of the violent bucking and writhing from the vibrator. It’s remarkably tender; her eyes clouded, in the intimate space they share in the steam of her bath. 

 _She’s going to be one of those ones who keeps trying to bridge aftercare into sex,_  he worries, but it’s a sharp kind of excited thought at the possibilities. 

She grips his hand under the water, trying to slide his fingers inside of her. 

“I said no penetration,” he tells her, and he sits back and takes his hand out of the water.

Rey sits, bubbles popping against her skin, stunned. The word is still new between them, coming from his side, that she doesn’t know if there are other options or if she’s just been rejected. She touches his shoulder, embarrassed, but he clears his throat and hands her a clean oversized t-shirt to wear.

She’s sees his erection straining his jeans when he stands up and walks out of the room. “I’ll order us some food. Remember to re-hydrate.”

She presses her wet face into the fabric and moans. 

He really is a sadist. 


	5. But lover, you're the one to blame, all that you're doing

Rey knows in her heart that she had previously pushed things with Ben too far. If he still felt guilty, it was his own problem, but despite all the times she lit up when he returned to her apartment toting in a midnight meal or giggled at him as he slingshotted a discarded pair of panties at her when a stream was over, she knew she was taking a little bit of advantage. 

Still, he didn’t have to go and make this whole thing  _terrifying_  to her. Who was that girl last night? Someone dependent and clingy and needy. Rey wasn’t supposed to be that girl, she hadn’t been before and she thought...

Her cheek is still resting on Ben’s sleeping chest. She realizes she probably hasn’t extracted herself enough from this situation enough to weigh in, but like a bad sunburn, embarrassment flares before it’s totally clearly visible. She still presses closer into his _blessed bare_ skin. 

Her voice is  _shot,_  because she didn’t whisper a god damn thing last night, except for when she sleepily lifted her head from his shoulder and asked  _“Do you wanna sleep here?”_

His hands were reassuring around her waist, in response, one stroked up and down her back. They had been stuck like that on the couch for a long time, time she hadn’t filled with talking because every time she did she thought about him looking in her eyes before the show for fours minutes and there was nothing she needed to say that could top that. They’d eaten a quiet dinner and he scooped her up to cuddle her to his chest on her couch. 

He was very generous of her sex-drunk slurring. 

 _“Sure,”_  he whispered back, and even though she was the one inviting he was the one who carried her into bed. 

She wakes up snuggled up to his body, feeling impossibly small, and spent the better part of that time awake rucking her shirt subtly up her stomach and opening her thighs to be the kind of the thing he’d want to  _prey upon_  in the first moments of consciousness. 

When he does open his eyes, and she looks back in them, he does take a moment to consider the display of herself she’s made. But he recoils like a snake, combing his fingers through his hair. 

“Oh, wow,” he scratches his scalp with a fake casual tone, “how long were we out for?”

Boy code for;  _We’re not discussing this._

He must catch her crestfallen expression because he cups her cheek in his big hand, drawing his face close to hers with a reassuring smile. “Sorry. I was going to get some stuff done today, is all. You want to help me plan next Friday’s show today?”

 _It’s Saturday,_  she wants to point out. 

Her voice is froggy and raw from the screaming last night, so the choking on her words can be blamed on that;  _“Yeah.”_

He regards her with a soft expression, she wants nothing more than to pull him to her and press her bare body to his. 

Instead, she watches him watch her feet, toes curling and fidgeting from where they’d kicked her blankets off. 

“There’s some things I need to pick up from N/Taboo,” he nuzzles her shoulder with his nose. She tries not to think about how practiced it is, meant to flatter her. For their X-rated partnership, this is an innocent as it gets, like him telling her she was  _like a sister to him._  “But if you find anything there that you think we could implement, I’d really like to hear your ideas.”

She could think of worse things to do than go to N/Taboo, the sex emporium near the laundromat that at least didn’t have those private porn booths so it was somewhat  _less_  sticky. It had a great late-night-running commercial;  _N/Taboo, the ‘T’ is silent..._

“Only if I get to plan one episode,” she fires off, so automatic she panics at the thought she’s pushed things too far by being demanding. 

Ben regards her quietly, touching her hair, examining her face in the sunlight. He may have had a point to ask how long they’d been asleep, it looked like high noon outside.

“Anything you want, Rey,” he says quietly, and her body clenches with guilt, like an elevator dropping a floor unexpectedly. She just keeps pushing him, and already she’s getting territorial for letting him push back. 

“I want-”

But her voice cracks and she doesn’t chase the thought. 

“We should probably...” He looks at the floor. “I think we skimmed what the definitions of aftercare could be for you, what qualifies, and I don’t want to take advantage when you’re in an emotionally vulnerable place. So I think...once the swelling’s gone down,” she crosses her legs at the mere mention of it, “we need to talk about it. There need to be stricter boundaries.”

He looks like he’s still recovering, along with how anxious he seemed holding her in his lap last night when all she did was rub her ass against him and coo in his ear. Rey has hit a wall with the “unattainable” thing; it’s no holds barred trying to get Ben to break and just _have sex with her._

It still feels like a punishment though, and she chews her lower lip instead of answering. 

Rey lifts his limp hand from the sheets and splays her fingers between his. His hands are  _huge_  next to hers, it makes her already sore pussy incredibly weary. She swallows thickly, but he seems to take her healthy fear of his size to heart and pulls away. 

_Couldn't she be reasonably scared without him panicking over this one thing?_

She watches the freckled muscles of his back as he pulls his jeans on. 

 _Skin to skin,_  she had whined the night before, _I want skin against mine, if I can’t have-_

With a wince, she sat up, her vagina radiating pain from the sudden movement. She was super glad he was currently shrugging on his shirt with his back to her. 

“I have a few errands to run this afternoon, you want to run out later to N/Taboo? I’ll text you when I’m ready to pick you up.”

“Sounds good,” she responds weakly, it’s like someone punched her in the groin from the night before. She’s not sure she can be cool and walk this off right away. 

She jumps at the hand on her shoulder; winces at a concerned look on Ben’s face. 

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she answers breezily, “it’s like a really bad period cramp, you know, when your uterus feels like it’s trying to crawl out of you. That kind of pain. Nothing I can’t handle.”

As soon as she says it, she realizes it’s true; it’s bearable, but it’s the cloying kind of pain that acts up when it’s not noticed. Now that Ben looks sick with himself, and trying to connect a lot of complex images that will never entirely make sense to him, she feels fine. 

“I’m getting you a hot water bottle,” he vanishes down the hallway. “Rest easy until I’m done with my errands, okay?”

“It’s my day off,” she reminds him, “So it was just going to be cartoons about robots and leftover pizza all day long.”

“Well, if you need a break from that,” he returns, hands full of the water bottle, which he chivalrously fits between her thighs. She sighs at the warm contact, “you might be more objective in the selection tonight because you’re a little cunt-shy.”

Rey snorts, lying on her back and wriggling down the bed with a smile. “Not a good enough excuse to use the word.”

He gives her an incredulous look, and in a flash he’s straddling her hips, holding her wrists down to the mattress with his hands. 

“I want to do so many bad things to that pussy when it feels better, baby, but now it’s a little cunt-shy, so I have to treat it nice.”

 _“Cunt”_  coming from Ben’s mouth is as perfect and sharp as a crescent moon. He’s not big on cursing, so the rarity makes her absolutely  _wild_  for him. 

Her back arches underneath him, but he’s lifted his lips away from her ear and is actually _laughing._ His glasses slide down the bridge of his nose. 

Rey groans. “You are a fucking sadist.”

“There’s an old joke,” he squeezes his thighs around her hips, and she has to stare at the ceiling to try to regain her heartbeat, “A sadist and masochist retire to the bedroom. Sadist says _'what do you want?'_ The masochist says  _‘I really want you to spank me so much’_  and so the sadist says  _‘no.’_ ”

Her breath is heaving, upper body limp despite how he’s  _literally holding her down._  He expected a little more, um, immediate rejection. 

“Very funny,” she mumbles lamely. Ben pulls away, having edged another boundary and recoiled in fear because he never found where it ended in his blind exploration.

He picks up his jacket from a chair by her bed. “I’ll text you,” he tells her casually, leaving her room in a normal context of a morning after despite the weirdest possible night before. 

Then he goes home and masturbates in the shower until his legs almost give out. 

...

 _“I do not like nipple torture,”_  Rey weaves past a display of clamps with a bounce in her step that defies the limp that impaired her that morning. It’s that time of evening in LA where it’s like living inside the center of the sun; orange and thick with humidity. Rey thrives on that time. She had a crappy terrace that could not be structurally sound off her living room that faced over a parking lot but she spent ungodly amounts of time there when the sun was hitting the city as it’s sneakiest angle, usually directly in his fucking eyes. 

Ben only went home to shower and slap some sense into himself. It didn’t exactly work, or took too much slapping to ever see the end of it. So he attempted a nap and a look at his schedule for the week. Did some laundry. Confirmed an email with the girl from N/Taboo.  And waited until it seemed even somewhat cool to want to immediately see Rey again, even though he could only pretend he was being cool for a few hours. 

She had gripped his hand in the parking lot, pressed to the sleeve of his leather jacket. He was cautious of the embrace, but she smiled apologetically up at him. 

“These places can be creepy, you have to have my back.”

“Always,” he murmured anyway. 

Even he knew she was laying it on a little thick, but she wedged his arm “accidentally” between her breasts and he had to hold his breath as he opened the door to the shop. 

He blinks around at the displays. Sunlight this bright creates a weird time to be in a sex shop, but it also successfully clears out perverts. 

“Any good ideas?” he whispers in her ear as she examines the first aisle of the store. 

“I had a thought,” she holds up a ball gag for him to expect. He shakes his head. 

“Me too, but it’s gone now.”

She laughs airily, leaning her elbow on a shelf of scented lube to look up at him. “About  _aftercare.”_

“You don’t have to whisper that, in this, of all places.”

She smirks up at him, sunlight playing off her freckles. She's a pretty white linen dress, sandals, and a denim jacket; date night wear, not sex shop wear. “You know what I miss about dating?”

“Noodles?”

She shakes her heard, suppressing her laugh.  _“Kissing._  The most. It’s my favorite.”

“ _That’s_  your idea?”

He can’t really think of any better one. 

“I want to kiss as my aftercare. We’re going to make out. I don’t need anything else. I can’t think of the last guy I did  _just kissing_  with.”

There's a dare in that statement; _good luck keeping it that way, fucker._ Her smile shows him she knows he's going to get caught soon. 

He lets her slide herself under his arm. He even lets a secret smile slip out when she buries her nose in the sleeve of his leather jacket to get the smell (it’s the only thing that lingers from the phase when he was a smoker) and though she hated the habit she said once that it reminded her of truckers her parents were friends with. It was a slap of a detail, odd and daring follow up questions, but her eyes made it clear she was testy about what information she was going to give out. 

“I can work with that,” he mumbles fondly. Just kissing. Kissing her naked body as she got in that cuddly mood. Kissing her swollen lips after they stretched around his cock. Kissing until she feel asleep in his arms. 

Maybe, someday, with the chimerical wish not unlike the ethereal dream of winning the lottery, he pictures him kissing her swollen pussy after it takes his cock. 

Rey pulls up to a display that has her teasing smile waver. 

“That’s...your dick.”

She points to a table stacked with boxes with  _his fucking face with it._

He wants to shove her behind his back or drag her out of the store like a toddler throwing a tantrum. He regrets that licensing deal so much in that moment. Even if it paid for his new car. 

“I...” Ben lets go of her hand. “Um. Yes.”

 _Kylo Ren,_  in bold dark script like a signature, covers one side of the box. The dildo inside is enormous and red,  _like neon-sign-red,_ and it’s just out there, for any woman to buy and feel inside her. Or man, to be fair, Jesus, did he think _anything_ through?

“Wow. So is that-?”

He only grabs her hand to yank her away with a groan as she peers closer.

“Yes, they made a latex mould off of my-” he gestures vaguely to the fly of his jeans. She spends maybe a second too long looking in that direction.

“So a lot of people have felt you inside them,” she wonders aloud, keeping her eyes on a shelf of edible lingerie. His safe impulse rises; the need to blurt out what he knows very well instead of talk about this.  _Sticky and too messy. It’s better to just improvise with real food._  She shoves her mouth into the heel of her hand like she’s holding back a torrent of words, but her eyes do flicker curiously to the dildo on display. They have to glide slightly, to scope the full length of it.

She does look intimidated by his cock; silicone or not.

Ben is still in business mode. He puts his hands on her shoulders and steers her away. 

 Rey lets out a whistle, plucking up a pair of handcuffs with two fingers to examine with a wrinkled nose. He drags her further down the aisle.  

“When you put it like that,” he gripes, trying to catch eyes with the cashier, who he’d been emailing in research of this trip, but she was on the front computer  _obviously not working._

“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with...that. It’s just  _out there, forever._  Wow, I say that like I haven’t been making money off my naked body on the internet for months, sorry, I'm actually being super judgmental-”

“Oh, sorry,  _are you Ben?”_

He flinches. The cashier has a cute smile and a face framed by her blunt bangs, and she’s tugging a cardboard box up onto the counter. 

"Yeah."

“I totally forgot you were coming in. This was the model you were talking about?”

He can tell from the serial number that it is, but he also researched this more than a normal person.

“Yeah, thank you.”

“This sybian is the real deal...” and it begins. She’s one of those candid types. He liked sullen salesgirls in this kind of transaction, he didn’t need a life story. 

Rey seems to like her, though. “Talk about customer service.”

Rey crowds the counter so Ben sort of has to go up and pay  _now._  

"One of those vibrating saddle things?" Rey wrinkles her nose. 

"It's life-changing," Rose assures her. 

Rey sighs. "Okay," she shakes her head gamely, but dubiously, "I'll give it a shot."

“Brilliant engineering,” the girl is blurting out details, “oh, Rose, by the way,” she thrusts her hand out for Rey to shake, and Rey’s kind enough to go along with awkward. Maybe that’s why he found her so perfect. 

“Rey.”

Rose suddenly isn’t quite listening, staring out the window for a moment too long; a guy in a brown leather jacket she seems to be expecting glides past the windows, not even looking inside as he crosses the parking lot. 

“Is he coming in?” Rey says dryly, but her smile is kind. 

Rose flushes and shakes her head. She withdraws visibly at the look on Ben’s face, and he feels bad but he can’t help how much he does not want to be doing this with the Rose Saga now.

“He works at the recruitment center around the corner, it’s uh...his break time. He was actually served with my sister, before she passed-”

Rose clearly has this timed to the minute.

"My condolences," Rey says soothingly, making deliberate eye contact. “So he's a friend of yours?”

Rey is swiping the card she uses for business expenses. She’d snuck that out while Ben was fuming, despite the machine being what _he_ was getting for  _her._  She casts him a look over her shoulder; he’s being rude, he knows it, especially since Rose spent five minutes monologuing about getting that specific model in stock for him because he asked.

“Not really,” Rose squeaks. “Doing talking with - _shit ‘doing talking’ what?-_ We’ve never spoken.”

Rey’s smile is easy and genuine.  _“Mystery_. Sexy. Next time he walks past, hold up one of those whips. Maybe slip a corset under that romper for him. He’ll get the hint.”

Rose finally does laugh as Rey signs the receipt. Rose bags the box in a comically large N/Taboo bag, one that size shouldn’t exist but they do need it for this. 

“By the way, you guys are like the coolest couple ever.”

“Thanks,” Rey says grandly, taking Ben’s arm. She can tell he just wants to leave, stuck in his own head, so she drags him back towards the entrance. 

They come to a stop at a display of BDSM gear of latex and plastic-looking pleather that even he would admit is too much. Rose doesn't even notice they're still there; she's staring dreamily out to the parking lot.

Rey places an eyeless mask over her face that makes her look like a serial killer. He rolls his eyes and gently removes it and hangs it back on its hook. He brushes her mussed hair back with a careful hand.

She gets the hint, and listens. There’s no judgment in her eyes, which is why her point, the cliched  _it’s out there forever_ for once has him thinking of the things he would take back if he could. He slings an arm around her shoulders more to steer her out of the store, _finally._

Ben doesn’t seem at all annoyed, or even embarrassed. Just somber. “It’s weird to think about, my body being out there like that,” he gestures behind them to the Kylo display that he was waiting for Rose to notice and put two and two together. “But, well, my mom...she didn’t do  _this,_  but she was an actress in the seventies for a brief phase, and there’s some bikini stuff from some B movie that...well I can’t read internet comments of anything involving my mom. But she was always chill about it. She said her body changed, so they had ownership of a  _moment_  in her life, not all of it. So it being out there... I could gain fifty pounds. I could get tattooed-”

_“-You could get in an accident that permanently destroys your penis-”_

He nudges her, but she got him to smile and she wears that victory all over her face. 

 “It’s not signing away my body for the rest of my life. It’s a moment.”

“I-” Rey licks her lips. “That’s usually a justification for letting go, but you do the opposite. You work out and diet and don’t date and the only people you see you work with. I don’t think it’s enough for you, when you have  _so much._  If everything changes, and this isn’t permanent, I wish you wouldn’t hold so much of yourself back for a fucking  _moment,_  Ben.”

Rey hefts up the sybian machine box against her chest as she makes her point, redistributing the weight. He should be carrying that. He should be holding the door open for her. He should be doing _anything_ right now, in this place he brought her to. But he’s too shaken. 

She could _just say that._ She could just casually let him know what he’d been missing out on for years. She could utterly bitch-slap his reality and squintingly check the sales receipt in her hand to see what he picked out for her at the same time.

He knew why this was a partnership now. Rey went along with her feelings. They were the only thing that ruled her. She was fiercely loyal to them, trusted them more than she’d trust anyone else. No one made her uncomfortable. No one pushed her too hard. She just fearlessly drove herself. 

It wasn't about hurting a weak, little thing. He was looking at the one person who would never let him hurt her, she'd walk right out of his life again. And he had to do everything in his power to fight that urge in him that hurt her before. 

He thought he had been the lone operative of his life, but the fact that he went into Hux’s office one day to handle a booking error and walked out with his dick preserved in silicone for the rest of his life to be pawned off online for anyone to use...

He never had sex without rules. Usually, literally,  _contracts._  Star Destroyer owned his sexuality, obligation loaned him out to Rey, and even then he was at war with what he was/wasn’t letting himself do with her. Rey’s feelings could crush him. One day she would see right through the fact he was in no more control of her than he was himself.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have messed up my timeline, I'm not sure I mention days of the week but revisionist history Kylo now does her Friday Camshow each week starting now. 
> 
> 1\. was that Naboo "not Taboo" pun not the stupidest thing you've ever read?  
> 2\. I now want to veer off into "Sex Shop Worker Rose and Recruitment Officer Finn" AU they hijacked this chapter for me. 
> 
> ps sorry about all the angst it'll be sexy next chapter


	6. Okay I know that you are not my type (still I fall)

Rey drops the shopping bag by the door and sheds her jacket once she enters the apartment. She gets punchy when it's too hot outside, like she's overcharged. Her arms swing absently at her sides when the jacket slips down her arm and onto the floor.

He hangs back in the hallway until she motions him to follow. 

She’s got a sway in her hips as she walks ahead of him; he’s never not watching her, so to pretend it wasn’t performative when  _she’s never walked like that in front of him before_ -

“Don’t we have episodes to plan?” She pulls her hair into a bun, the challenge implied by the simple act. 

He crosses into her apartment, swallowing back everything he wants to do to her. 

“Sybian can fill a full show, hell, some production companies have made it a series. I know what I'm doing.”

“I’m aware,” she hoists herself onto her kitchen counter, leaning towards a jar on the counter she’s filled up with pretzels and starts to feast. He relaxes a little bit. She is just talking business.

Crumbs all over her face, she holds the jar out to him. He waves it away. Rey always ate like the world was going to end, he prefers to observe to see if she ever calms down and stops acting like she will never get to eat again. 

 _“I had...an absent family,”_  was the only indication she ever made that this quirk may have stemmed from her rough childhood. It’s why nothing made him feel better than making her light up when he brought food to her. 

“How familiar are you with a sybian?”

There isn’t much to know; just a black plastic mount roughly in the shape of a human torso with a rubberized attachment that vibrated at the top; meant to straddle on one’s knees and let the machine do the work. They were popular at Star Destroyer because you didn't need to build a new set, or find a location, or a lot of performers, or like, a cop uniform. You just had to clear out some floor space and get a decent amount of coverage of a woman squatting over it and orgasming, _a lot._

“I’ve seen a few of those shows, I just thought the machine is a little pricey, and I like the flexibility of the stuff I have. But I trust you,” she swings her legs and pulls out her phone. “I was watching some of those videos on the car ride home on my phone, it looks like the same kind of edging stuff we did last time, just like, with me in cowgirl on the device that’s getting me off instead of writhing underneath it.”

“You were watching porn on the ride home?”

“Uh huh,” she says absently, “I bookmarked this one-”

“Rey,  _we were in traffic-_ ”

 _“-that you were in,”_  she raises her eyebrows.

He bites his lower lip, glancing away from her. She turns her screen towards him. He shudders, the girl on the machine is taking his dick all the way down her throat as he thrusts in. It’s paused when he’s making a particularly tortured expression as he holds her gagging head in place. 

It’s weird to consult his porn with her. It’s suddenly a side he’s not sure he wants her to see. 

“So am I going to be doing the honors?” she teases, her smile too easy for this to be some set-up. Still, his whole body is reeling at the knowledge they have the sybian in the box, and he’s here, and  _she’s right there,_  and even with assembly they could be about an hour away from making that real.

But what difference is that from every fucking moment he chickened out of begging her to lie with him?

“No,” he clears his throat, “Not to you. That’s too rough.”

“I can handle it-”

“Rey, no, I said start small.”

She closes that tab on her phone, her annoyance apparent.  _“Fine.”_

He sighs and collapses on her couch. “What did you have in mind for your episode?”

“Not telling you,” she responds sullenly, paging through her phone. “We’ll do your sybian one, I guess I’ll just sit there and let whatever goes down go down.”

He shrugs, “It doesn’t have to be that simple. Instead of my manipulating the toy to your body, I can manipulate you to the toy. Press you down against it or lift your legs to take it at different angles.”

Her amused look returns.

“That’s kind of hot,” she says, and there’s a hint of flirtation there.

There’s a pause between them, and a shy smile.

“I can tie you up again.”

He sees Rey soften up as she exhales through her nose.  “Like I said, I’m already on board.”

He leans back, not smiling, but  _embodying_  his smile in that way he does. “Good.”

“What next?” she crosses her legs. There’s a defensive press of her thighs from one to the other. He smirks. No matter what he’s trying to prevent, getting her wet was always going to be an internal victory for him.

“I think we should have a frank discussion about spanking.”

She snorts.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“I’ve seen enough to know you know how to make them  _look_  real.”

She narrows her eyes. “That’s because they are.”

“Well, clearly they aren’t, coming from the sadist in the room.” He laughs softly when she protests again; “You do a good job. You make your ass nice and red. I see how flushed it is when you’re done. It  _sounds_  genuine on the mic. But that’s a display spank for camera and you know it. You could teach that at a stage combat class.”

She laughs into her hands. “Ben, this is LA. Don’t give me ideas.”

He rests his elbows on his knees, hiding a smile under all that hair. “I don’t like the pretense of spanking a sub when it isn’t earned through previously discussed terms. Nothing means anything when you just start wailing on someone because you’re trying to look tough. It just seems like you don’t get it’s disciplinary and you just want to see an ass get hit, like an object.”

“You’re awfully psychological for a porn star.”

“That’s because good sex is psychological, Rey, and it doesn’t have to be bad sex just because it’s porn.”

She looks away, because she was really new to porn when they got introduced; he wasn’t her first scene but she had been stalling before that with girl/girl and one casting couch blowjob scene that he would never, ever bring himself to watch. But from what she’s told him, porn has only been bad sex, from the way she jokes about being on camera or her bad knee or whatever they watch for research. 

 _“I love the feeling of a french-tipped manicure shoved up my vagina,”_  she once quipped as they were brainstorming how to shoot her camshow with Phasma by watching some other girl/girl streamers. He had laughed, but every french-tipped-manicure he saw on a set made his stomach turn from then on, and there were  _a lot._

She looks back up at him, her eyes challenging. “If I got on your lap right now you really wouldn’t take the chance to slap my ass? Make me think of you every time I sit down for the next few days?”

He swallows the lump in his throat. 

“Don’t play games.”

“I don’t want to play games either; it’s a simple question.”

“You haven’t done anything to make me like feel you need it,” he amends, and she drops from the countertop and  _fucking crawls on her hands and knees_  towards him. 

“You think I don’t spank myself hard enough?” she slides her tongue across a rip in the knee of his jeans. His leg seizes and kicks the coffee table by accident. The entire table tips over from the force of it. He’s terrified he scared her, his gracelessness and lack of control now painfully obvious. She laughs, he feels the breath on the wet line she traced on his exposed skin.  _“Easy._ This is a frank conversation, so why don’t you show me how hard.”

She bites his skin, a sharp pinch, but he doesn't kick again.

His head falls back against the back of the couch. “Get up here.”

She stands up, and he lifts her skirt to help her shimmy her panties off. Holding the white linen in his hands, exposing her ass as she straddles his lap, is enough for him to briefly regain his control. He collects the fabric in one hand and gets his other all over the curves of her ass. 

“Now I’m not spanking you for no reason,” he cups her face in his hand after he’s prepared her to accept him, “as much as you think you’ve made your point. I’m spanking you because this is a teachable moment. I’m spanking you because we need to establish what your limits are. And I’m spanking you because lately when you don’t get your way you become quite the little brat.”

_“If anyone here is spoiled it’s you-”_

But the look in his eyes shuts her up. 

 _“This_ is what you do for camera,” he whispers in her ear, and she tenses when he gives what really is a playful slap. That feels good, but familiar, and dirty only because he’s been paying closer attention than she thought when she does it to herself. 

She combs her fingers into his hair with a smug expression. “It works,  _it doesn’t have to be real-”_

He smacks harder, enough to make her fall forward a little bit. She grips his shoulders for balance. 

“That was a two on the scale of real spanking. Maybe you’re getting fucked and you just want to feel a smack. Lots of women like that. If you remember your numbers, you can ask me for what you want more easily. How do you feel about trying a five?”

“Yes,” she says automatically, her knees shifting around his hips to get some better footing. The next slap does startle a cry out of her. She chokes it off, her mouth hanging open, and she shivers at his smug expression when she finds her face so close to his, her mouth almost brushing his mouth.

“That’s for when the sub is being a brat and mouthing off, trying to provoke you. I don’t use much more than a five that often.”

“You’ve made such a good point out of that,” she bites back sarcastically, and he laughs. “More, then.”

“Okay,” his hand swings hard, and stays on her ass cheek when it collides, rubbing the skin in gentle circles after striking it with the flat of his palm. She cries out.  _“This_  is an actual punishment. But not  _severe._  Maybe a seven, eight. This is when you offer your body as your apology. Know what this feels like, because if you get any higher than this that means  _I am doing something wrong and you should safeword.”_

He slaps her again, gripping the cheek with strong fingers. A definite eight. 

Rey bucks against him and pulls his hair. He grips her hips and holds her down on his lap until she goes still. 

“Tell me your safeword.”

Her forehead brushes his neck. She’s chewing her thumbnail, holding her breath,  _waiting._

“Falcon.”

“Okay. Good girl.”

“What’s- _what’s a ten?”_

“You’re not getting a ten.”

“But I-”

“Oh, so you like pain now,” he teases, gripping her hair to arch her neck up. His teeth pinch the skin under her ear  _hard._  She yelps, bearing down on his lap, and he laughs. He sucks the skin hard enough to bruise, losing control of his grip on her pleasure as it melts into  _theirs._  She writhes against him with her fingers fisted tight in his hair.

“We should...we should probably stop,” he murmurs against her shoulder. The strap of her dress is falling down, it’s just bare collarbone against his lips.

“A-aftercare?” she mumbles, slinging her arms around his shoulders, and he laughs softly. He cups her ass in his hands, and it’s radiating heat from his wails on her. 

When he spanks a girl during a scene at Star Destroyer, they release it weeks later with the words “Kylo Ren Abuses Ass” in some form or another in the title. He does what Rey does with a theatrical exaggeration of it, but it’s still something that he never thinks twice about when he gets in his car to go home. 

_How many women have been icing bruises because of me? How many women weren’t like Rey and didn’t say a thing-_

She needs him, in this moment, and she drags him away from the self-reflection. 

“I didn’t forget, baby girl.” He tries to comb her hair out of the way, but she’s locked around him, clinging with arms and legs. He presses his lips to the shell of her ear, “You want me to kiss you, baby?”

“I want to tell you something first.”

When he’s like this, he can’t hold back.  _He has to pry her fucking open._

“What is it, Rey? Don’t be scared, baby.”

“I had a dream about you,” she pulls her face away from his neck, instead weaving her fingers into his hair and stroking it away from his face. Opening him up. She rises on her knees to look down at him. He’s so glad he made it easier for her to look him in the eyes the other night, it’s already changed so much of the way they talk to each other. 

“What was it about?”

“We were in the ocean,” she flushes and looks over his shoulder. “And I was straddling you. It was weird, like my board vanished from underneath me and you were keeping me afloat. And I wanted you so badly.”

His tongue has gone completely dry.

“It was just a dream.”

“And I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s driving me crazy. All because of fucking dream  _from a nap you made me take.”_

“Shh, I’m here, it’s okay. Let me calm you down. I know it’s a lot. Let me kiss you, I’ll go crazy if you don’t let me kiss you-”

 _“No,”_  she cradles his face, strokes her thumbs over his brow and forehead. She doesn’t let him up, “I wanted you inside me, and no matter how much I moved against you, you wouldn’t let me. I was so mad at you when I woke up, and I didn’t know why I was so mad.”

Her back arches and her body grinds against his stomach from where he’s slouched into the couch. Her thighs spasm for a moment, but it’s not until he’s done releasing a massive groan that he looks down as sees her wetness soaked through his white t-shirt where she straddles his stomach. She looks embarrassed. She looks so hot and frustrated and exhausted that she might  _cry._

“Show me,” he surrenders finally, “Show me the dream.”

Rey’s knees bear down into the cushions, her hips moving against his jeans. Her wetness rubs against the fabric, but the friction is exactly what she needs nudging against his painfully hard erection. 

“Fuck, baby,” he finally purrs, the first time he’s shown her arousal instead of just approval. Rey fucking  _loses_  it. 

He can tell when the position is just right, because she grips him tightly and just rides against him, rocking like the ocean had rocked her hips in the dream; her body answering the question that had been asked while she slept. 

She just keeps stroking his hair. Testing how soft it is between her fingers, sliding them through the silkiness-  _she’d always wanted to know._

“Don’t ever be fucking embarrassed around me,” He grips her jaw in a tight hand, but he seems to understand that she wants pain with it too, with how rough she’s giving it to him, and she goes slack between his fingers as he searches her face. “I want all of you.”

She can’t get away. But she doesn’t look afraid. 

Rey nods frantically, “I want all of you too. Please give me  _you_ , I don’t think I can take anymore of being your-”

Her voice gives out and her motions are wild, irregular; he made her come with their clothes on. 

If he wasn’t so fucking close he would have demanded she finish that thought, but  _oh-_

"Use me," he begs her, and he sees it flicker in her eyes that she realizes _he has no fucking control of what's happening._

Dry humping is a concept he typically sneers at as a porn performer.  _Really? Are we in high school?_  But Rey feels so good riding him with her strong thighs, making noises he wants to bottle and drink down, and his cock is giving her pleasure  _without_  hurting her, which is both tormenting and adding to his own.

“I can’t feel anything until you do,” he groans out, his hands guiding her hips. He’s definitely not Kylo, and definitely not the dominant one when her orgasmic cries make him cum in his pants. 

...

Rey holds her breath as she opens the envelope, he can tell by the way she’s holding her fingers she’s dubious about the contents. But she smiles through it anyway like the world’s most self-defensive Vanna White. 

She grins genuinely as she peers inside, holding up two Cheesecake Factory giftcards. 

“Thank you Mike! Wow, you’re literally taking me out to dinner!” 

She winks at the camera, and Ben is still wondering why he’s watching. Or if the guys who send Rey fanmail know she spends half that money on a dinner for him as well, and he gets to eat it in her presence. 

Rey claimed exhaustion after what happened the night before,  _that was the aftercare_  she had quipped when he tried to cajole her from her limp position on his chest so he could kiss her. He settled on her temple and her sweaty hair, lips never leaving and daring no sentiment further than how beautiful and sexy she was because he felt anything deeper would incite something explosive that would never let them leave her apartment. And he felt too raw to try to open any wounds. So he just held her until she said it was getting late and he knew that was a request for him to leave because of things he wasn’t saying. 

She was even keeping him away tonight, citing the soreness between her legs for the low-key show she’d do (PG-13 roulette wheel of spankings, squats, and a little twerking for the camera and clearing out her PO Box, which she did about once a month or so) so she offered to take the reins for her next show as well. He reluctantly agreed, knowing this could all be overwhelming, and after being as vulnerable as she was being with him she would want some independence and to prove she could handle things on her own. 

He also had to get his bi-weekly California mandated STD test that day so he wasn’t really in a  _place_  to claim ownership. It was a nightmare; something that was as boring and routine as a flu shot to him turning a whole different direction when he found himself thinking about  _her_ at the exact wrong time and the poor clinic nurse having to be face-first with an erection when she had to swab him. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, wanting to die, “I was just thinking about my girlfriend.”

Which sounded like something a virgin would say, and the nurse’s smile seemed to imply the same thing. 

So as penance for his inappropriate lust he’s spending his Sunday night  _watching_  Rey stream from home instead of helping her there, so the distance she must have intended isn’t going according to plan.

 _“UnclePlutt,”_  she glares at the screen, Ben’s eyes flash to the comments section. She always had to take that sexy-schoolteacher-scolding voice when one person was acting up, so not to isolate the others. It still meant a lot of careful maneuvering when she was uncomfortable. It always made him only slightly less than murderous. 

 _She can handle this on her own,_  he reminds himself, sipping his can of iced tea.  _She did before you and she will do after you._

She raises her eyebrows, eyes flickering side to side as she read the incoming comments. “100 tokens and I flash.”

She smiles, nudging her bralette to hug one of her breasts enough to  _almost_  spill out, coaxing. Tokens roll in. He loves watching his girl work them over. 

UnclePlutt doubles down, maybe offers a quarter of that in the comments. Rey shrugs. “Guess I’m just going to have to open something else from one of my  _generous viewers instead,_ ” she hold up a package and a box cutter, only moderately threatening as she smiles at the camera and the blade clicks up from its spring. 

“Oh, this one’s from  _GoingForSnoke,_ ” she smirks to herself, shaking her head, “you’re going to get me into trouble, just like last time.”

His eyes scan the pile of loot behind her; stuffed animals she’ll have to instagram cuddled between her breasts, bath bombs she’ll writhe around with on her x-rated paid snapchat, books she’ll pretend to have read because men kept sending her Kerouac when she said once that she’d never read him (he knew her, she didn’t need to, she didn’t need to be  _educated_  or  _fixed_  by men). All with fawning thank-yous (why was everything they sent her  _crap?_ ) for their generosity and mild levels of obsession; a token to manifest their dreams that maybe that stripper was into them, maybe their waitress was totally giving them bedroom eyes, maybe their female friend wanted to be more than friends. 

She fumbles the bubble mailer open, her lap fills with cash. She swallows thickly, counting up the money or at least getting a lump estimation of the amount there. It’s a lot, even if he can’t see it. He just knows her face. 

There’s a wrapped box next to it. She can’t keep the apprehensive look on her face as she opens the card. 

“ _‘Just like your Kylo,’_ ” she reads aloud, wrinkling her nose in disgust only enough for Ben to be able to notice, not that she knew he was watching, and then unwraps the box. 

What are the fucking odds. It’s almost too sinister. 

It looks so wrong in her hands, even still in the box. The official Kylo Ren dildo. He was there when they set the mould around his cock. He knew it was the real thing. 

GoingForSnoke set them up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually typically don't like spanking, so this was interesting to write. I may have learned something about myself.


	7. Can you hear the violence?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mild trigger warning for some of the comments on Rey's stream this time (rape mention).

 Rey had once told him that she resented people attempting to understand her through her porn.

A stick of Pocky shoved in the corner of her mouth like a cigarette, wrapped in a big sweatshirt, she was going through comment logs of the stream they just finished, and there was always something;  **you seem upset today.**

**You remind me of this girl.**

**I bet your father left you.**

“When you try to simplify me down in that way, _‘oh you’re just this because I say so,’_  it’s just as objectifying.”

Ben sipped his iced tea. “I’m used to being a blank slate. I never thought about it that way.”

“You don’t have to,” she expressed her annoyance at the world with a searing glance towards him. 

“I’m just a dick,” he reminded her, not looking in her eyes. “I just show up and leave everything at the door and do what they tell me to do.”

_“You’re_  doing most of the fucking,” Rey set her laptop aside, “you’re acting on another person’s body. You can’t say you feel powerless.”

He pushed his glasses up with his hand, rubbing his fingers over his eyes. 

“And _you’re_  doing it all on your own. You’re the director, the talent, the producer. You get to decide how you’re portrayed.”

Rey tapped a few keys, but he could tell she was not even looking at the screen beside her on the floor.

“Not all on my own,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” he conceded, scrolling through the same comments she was angered by;

**You’re faking it. I bet if I got you on my dick you’d scream.**

“You’re not alone,” he added, but Rey was quiet, only reading the comments and chewing on the candy stick in her mouth.

Trying to get a grasp on her feelings through the way she pretended was something he had promised himself he’d never do.

…

**GoingForSnoke: I’m glad you like it.**

**GoingForSnoke: You should show us how much you appreciate the gift.**

Ben begs for some kind of full scale disaster that erases the internet and fries cell phones, an earthquake that shatters camera lenses throughout the greater LA area.

Rey is looking at the box in her lap, her fingers prying the top flap open. It doesn’t take an armchair psychiatrist with an internet connection to be able to tell she’s uncomfortable.

“Too generous, and a little too big for me,” Rey quips dryly, her eyes finding the camera, like she’s trying to call the viewer’s bluff. Ben swallows. There’s hope, there’s hope, he’s gripping his phone with white knuckles because he wants to call her right now and tell her he’s in the hospital, bleeding out, and his dying wish is for her to fucking  _toss that thing down the garbage disposal._

He has never done a cuckhold scene in his career but it’s about to happen with his own goddamn cock.

This is so fucked up. He should have begged her to let him touch her. Even if she had rejected him it would have been better than  _this._

**GoingForSnoke: Your instructions are in the note.**

_Rey is the yes girl, the ideal girlfriend, the girl next store who you can bang without consequences._

He had helped brand her as that.

She fumbles with the packaging.

“Just a preview,” she waves off the deeper implications. She’s taking orders from someone else now, and it’s tearing him apart inside.

“Damn,” she shudders when she removes the toy from the box. The size of it next to her forearm makes him feel vague sympathy for her. 

_It’s not fair,_  his mind is screaming,  _I did the right thing and it’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not fair._

Rey’s lips close around the head. She adjusts, like she’s taking a bite of something she underestimated the size of, her cheeks flexing. She moans. He can’t look away. She sucks, popping the tip out of her mouth.

“I can’t get this down my throat,” she laughingly protests to the siege of commenters. 

He just stares at her wet lips.

“Now, the thing I don’t think people know about dildos…what  _straight men don’t know about dildos,_  is that they have less give than a real person’s dick. They don’t compare.”

He can feel the wheels in her head turning, his brilliant girl, and she takes her power back in the most genius way he couldn’t think of,  _“Sure I could suck this fake dick, but what if I made you focus on it being your real one instead.”_

It also means she’s 100% sure he’s not watching.

“The real thing is so much warmer and softer,” she traces the moulded vein up the length of what was his shaft, frozen in time. A moment he can now never stop reliving, just like this one is. Hypnotized, he’s turning into another one of her drooling idiot viewers. He always needed to be on the other side of the camera, knowing how she worked, to be able to stop it. 

She squeezed her breasts over the lace covering them, and for good measure, slid one free and caressed it, leaning back so that her hard nipple was getting all the attention in the frame. But she put the toy back in her mouth. Her eyes closed, giving off a wet sound as she sucked. 

Her mouth gets a little messy and she lets out a moan, smiling and flickering her eyes back to the comments.

They both see it: He sees it in her eyes and he feels rage he’s never felt before.

**FirstOrdered: I want to see you get raped with a dick that big.**

He doesn’t think twice when he types, posting for the first time on her stream;

**Anonymous User: Falcon.**

…

Rey can’t do this anymore.

She cannot believe she fucked everything up this badly.

She fucked up so bad she doesn’t even know what it is that she _ruined._

She ends the stream immediately. She goes on a rampage through her apartment, she eats  _everything_  in her kitchen. She does the thing where she goes into her shower crying, believing she will walk out of it with clean hair and not crying. That doesn’t work, and by the time she’s gotten the shampoo lathered up she can’t even stand up she’s still crying so hard.

So she does the unthinkable; she calls her therapist.

She hasn’t told  _anyone_  in her life about this, not even Ben.

Dr. Skywalker has been a constant but inexplicable presence in her life since she started camming. He was rather unorthodox, so maybe that’s why she committed to it. She started going after the Star Destroyer incident because he was cheap and relatively private and well…her body felt like a fucking disaster where the eye of the hurricane was her own brain. There was never anyone in the waiting room of the office, a nun who loathed her was his receptionist. He had once vaguely waved off the mention that his practice was part of his mission work but she could not place this guy to any religion. He wore ugly grey sweaters and always scowled at her. They snapped at each other constantly during sessions. She threatened to go find a new therapist about once a month, and he attacked the houseplants lining his office with a spritzer bottle and told her he’d be happy to retire if she wasn’t such a mess that he had a professional obligation.

Then she’d say she worried about how he would take it too much because she didn’t have a strong father figure and he’d laugh and say “If I could burn all of Freud’s works, I would.”

She had a strange habit of telling him  _everything,_  which he could make her regret all the time, but she wasn’t bullshitting him that way. They both preferred that.

Rey went back every week, but she’s never called him at night like it was an emergency. She is kind of stunned he bothered to pick up.

“Kind of late to tell me you’ve found a new therapist.”

She rolls her eyes, which is hard because they’re puffy from crying so hard. “You’re  _awful_  at this. I could be suicidal. I could be at rock bottom.”

“That’s the trick to talking to someone at rock bottom. Start with a joke. Are you suicidal?” 

“No,” Rey replies sullenly. She sniffles for effect. 

“Then I’ve wasted my joke. Why are you calling me?”

“Because… _Sven”_  (always code for Ben, she was too cagey for real names) “we’re…in a weird place. And I want to go over to his apartment tonight.”

There’s a meditative pause, like Dr. Skywalker is really weighing her problem. “You don’t have a single female friend you can text about this?”

“You’re supposed to help me,” she spits back, and she hears him grumble and sit up in what is probably his bed. 

“Well, you’re in a weird place possibly because you added a sexual relationship into a professional one,  _which never complicates things,_  so I can’t imagine why you’re having this problem.”

“It’s not a relationship,” she puffs up defensively.

“Oh, then that definitely simplifies it.”

She tells him about the general idea of the rape comment. Not the...extra level of fucked up. He sighs.

“I don’t know what to tell you about that, kid. Men are horrible. There’s nothing you can do to change that person. If you can't change it, you need to shut it out. Block them and move on.”

“Be _-this guy-_  doesn’t want to touch me because, um…” this whole night is too hard to explain. She doesn’t have the heart to ruin Dr. Skywalker’s night. “He saw the comment, and he’s…he’s scared of hurting me, so this is just going to send him across state lines to get away from me.”

“If he responds to that by not  _being there_  for you, then that’s all you need to know about him.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“I can’t do that. But I’ll ask you; are you going there because you think it’ll help you gain control the situation? It won’t. You have to let go of that fantasy.”

“So I do nothing?”

“It sounds more like you think if you present yourself a certain way, he has to respond in kind. That’s not  _doing_  something; that’s offering yourself passively and waiting for him to act like you want him to. That’s not how people work. That’s a test, and he’s going to resent it. You can’t control him. You can’t control anyone. Not him, not the viewers of your…show. Even if you think you’re being perfect, and what you’re offering him is the best idea for everyone involved, it’s not coercing him into responding to you the way you want. And if it’s bothering you, this situation is at an impasse and you need to address your feelings, even the bad ones. So don’t try and fix him tonight. Get some sleep.”

“You’re accusing me of doing nothing while also encouraging me to do nothing.”

“No, you’re trying to get me to justify your impulsivity by caging me in with a badly-thought-out argument. Not falling for it, kid. Now, we can talk about how right I am at our next session.”

“What if I don’t listen to you?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. Now me, I wouldn’t go over there. Things are too raw. It’s not going to end the way you think.”

…

Ben doesn’t really like leaving his apartment, but now he feels utterly trapped. 

He has a nice kitchen that he never uses. A terrace that’s always empty. Now it sits, glowing with city light, taunting him for being selfish. Rey has a crappy little apartment and a minuscule terrace that looked over a parking lot and guys from her complex would catcall up to her every time she sat down. But she loves sitting out in the sun, so she put up with it. And he only  _imagined_  bringing her here, serving her breakfast at the patio furniture out there and kissing the corner of her mouth and then her lips because feeding her made her so sweet. He only pictured a thousand times fucking her right afterwards with his hands on the stomach he had filled, keeping her safe and caring for her. He wanted to have her sleeping there in his big bed where they could both stretch out and no one was saying degrading things about the body he loved so much.

He never, ever shared himself with Rey, not even his own obsession with her. This place is a tomb of good intentions he never acted upon. 

There’s luxuries there afforded by his longest relationship; that with his own rage. There’s a spare room with a punching bag and he shuts off the computer and instead of breaking everything he can get his hands on, he puts on his gloves and lets it all out into his blows. 

His mother’s criticism, suppressed years of comments building up surge out of him in an avalanche. 

Emails and voicemails from the last ten years;

_“Look, is it because I went into film academia that you’re punishing me? It’_ _s not all Maya Deren you know. Did I spend too many afternoons talking about conference lectures on the male gaze and you snap, just like your father? Are you going this far to prove to me that men can be objectified too? Or do you really want to prove you can succeed in the opposite of what I’ve done with my life? Or do you really want us to fight over the ‘porn’ or ‘art’ debate every time we talk until you put me in an early grave?”_

_“Ben, I’m a sex positive feminist, but even this…it’s a lot to ask for a mother to sit back when you have had every opportunity given to you to follow your dreams. Do you want me to call some old friends, see if there’s an opening this summer at Lando’s production company?”_

_“What happened to that samurai script you wrote a few summers back? I just had lunch with a friend who would like to take a look at it.”_

_“UCLA has added a course “Political Coding in Science Fiction Films of the Twentieth Century” and that sounds right up your alley. I have a few contacts in admissions. Ben, this is what you wanted. Let me help you.”_

_“Everything I’ve tried to build for this family, I did for you. I love you. You know that. I just want you to come home.”  
_

He finds his broken dream of filmmaking ironically upended by something he would never be genius enough to stage on a screen; a camgirl reduced him to a mere object in a matter of seconds. His mother would love that.

He has been so sure of his choices up until now.

…

**I’m outside.**

**Ben.**

**I fucked up.**

**Please, Ben.**

**I didn’t think you’d watch it I just meant this as like a night off for you and it was an ungodly amount of money and I was in shock.**

**Ben, let me make it better.**

Rey sits in her parked car at the address she’s never been to. Ben’s always been private and they’ve never met up at his place. 

She had to pull over at one point on the drive when the contents of her entire kitchen binge wanted to rise up her throat, she parked at the side of the road and threw up. Her gorged stomach emptied onto the gravel of a dark street. Rey has had food issues since she was young, mostly from malnourishment, and the lack of control…

She gave herself five minutes to breathe and got back in the car to drive to his apartment. Bile still coats her mouth.

She’s been sitting her a while, radio silence on his part, her face swollen from crying. She can’t go home.

Ben hasn’t answered a single text. 

There’s a shadow in the stairwell leading to the parking lot. Ben’s hair is wet, he’s in sweatpants and a tee shirt. His eyes are locked on her car, locked on her. They watch each other through the windshield as he stalks over to her. 

She doesn’t know what she’s afraid of over the look on his face. He’s not wearing his glasses.

He opens the door and slides in her car. Wordlessly, he holds up his phone. Four minute timer. She nods.

He sets it. They both take a deep breath and look in each other’s eyes. 

“I was in the shower,” he clears his throat, “and…beating the shit out of a punching bag.”

“Are you angry?” she whispers.

“Not at you.”

“But you’re angry.”

“Yes, baby.”

“Tell me.”

He curses under his breath. “Talking about this…”

“I know. Give it four minutes.”

And she feels his anger unfurl and fill the car around her. His eyes are  _murderous,_  but not at her. It’s a protective, righteous rage. She can feel it. She wants to climb into his body and be held by it. He’s not mad at her. 

He deserves to be mad at her. 

She’s so afraid that the timer goes off after what feels like an instant. 

“You look pale,” he tells her.

“I threw up.”

He swears again, digging through her backseat for a water bottle. The water’s a little stale but it’s better than the taste in her mouth. 

“I’m so sorry, I’m sure my breath was gross-”

He doesn’t want to tell her that vomit, bodily fluids, all of it wasn’t new to him after almost a decade in porn. That he’s had it on his dick, that he’s kissed girls who had just gagged. There was always the habit to envision the best version of something bad, and Rey had been giving him the benefit of the doubt since day one. But letting her believe that is beginning to feel like lying.

_‘It’s just so abusive to women’_ was the only real thing his mother had said that made it really sound like he had broken her heart.

"Don't ever be ashamed in front of me," he touches the side of her face. She feels how tense he is, how hard he endeavors to be gentle. "You're a person. I need to see you that way."

She remembers his rule, somewhat of a promise, about this partnership; _you will belong to yourself._

“Come inside,” he pleads quietly, and she nods, ready to be out of this car. 

They take the elevator up. They stand in silence, side by side. “There’s only one way this can go,” he tells her. 

She nods. 

When they cross the threshold to his apartment, she blinks around. He’s sure she’s surprised by the size of the space, the DVDs lining an entire wall for a passion he’s never even admitted to her. He wonders if she could ever love him, because of what he gave up. That he had connections she never did and sneered at them.

Her throat seems to chord with tension at that beautiful patio balcony. Longing. 

He tamps the guilt down as he leaves her in the living room, blinking around at the space she’s finally invited into. 

He comes back from his room with a length of silky rope. Rey startles and looks ready to protest. He understands, because in this moment she doesn’t.

“Rey. For this conversation to happen, I need you to tie me up.”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So if y'all were waiting for this to culminate into something, oh yeah, next chapter.


	8. I'm just the sucker who let you fill her mind (but what about love?)

“So, an interrogation, then?”

He slips his shirt over his head, watching her fumble with the rope.

Rey examines his space for the first time; spacious, precise, clinical. Kind of like him. There's a chaotic abstract painting covering one wall that feels like a precipice she could be sucked down. Blinds are drawn. Enclosed. 

Ben's already seated on his bed, so focused and sure about this that she almost feels like he's the one in control again. He won't be for long. 

She can picture Ben in her room. He's _been_ in her room. He's retrieved bralettes from her drawers after she's stained the one she had on during a pre-show snack. One time he helped her put up a shelf from ikea and they sat on the floor drinking beer in the nest of instruction manuals because it was too momentous a task to not admire from the ground. He's slept in her bed. 

This is Ben. There are thousands of guys a night who want her; but there's only one there at two in the morning helping her wash whipped cream out of her hair and diligently making sure she gets fed and icing her knee with the constancy of a World War Two nurse.

Ben has rejected this conversation, any conversation, about taking it further, or if their sexual contact changed things. 

While already inside his room, Rey doesn't know how to enter it. In her shorts and a tee shirt, she feels underdressed, barefoot she feels like she's walking into a freezer. She considers this the baby step that it is, but it still feels huge. Ben was often holding his heart in his hand out to her, but it was like he was wearing a mask when he was doing it. She never knew what to make of that.

He's watching her from the bed. Right. They have a situation. 

He offers her an arm to attach to the headboard. He even uses his free hand to help tie it off. 

There’s chorded energy she feels in all of his limbs, the efforts of biding him seeming laughingly futile. 

“Really making me confident here that this will keep you from escaping,” but she brushes her fingers over his chest as she says it, climbing over his lap to get the other arm. 

“It’s not about keeping me here in unbreakable bonds. Most kink-centric handcuffs are made for the wearer to easily escape. It’s about you wanting me to be tied, and me wanting to be here.”

She sits on the side of his bed, fluffing his hair, waiting for part two. 

“…Because if it’s an issue of me breaking free if I wanted to, I could be out in three seconds.”

 _“There it is,”_  she replies blandly, but there’s a swell of affection in her voice. She sighs, tucks her face into his shoulder. He leans his head to the side, against hers. 

“Too tight?”

“It’s fine. Are you stalling, sweet girl?”

She shifts her body closer, cuddling his bare chest. She could stay like this for a long time, with him vulnerable, after he had to control all of their other encounters. But she did not feel like his _sweet girl_ tonight. 

“I keep thinking of more and more shit we have to talk about. This is going to be a nightmare.”

“I know.”

“Ben-”

He swallows, “Call me Kylo.”

She looks ready to spit at him. 

“You asked for this,” she points out, crawling up to him, “For me to be in control.”

 He nods. Silent. She admires his impressive wingspan across the width of the bed. Touches his arms, the sinew of muscle. He’s so much bigger than her, yet somehow more manageable underneath her when he’s restrained. 

“You’re Ben,” she says tightly. He shivers. "No more detachment. No more bullshit."

 _“Fine,”_ but his tone is unsure.

And she is mildly relieved that he doesn’t have those metal hooks for restraints permanently attached to the headboard, just some strategically shaped bedposts that probably weren’t  _meant_ for bondage but still worked. She’s not sure she can handle this all the time. She would be fine with just, like, having sex without the constant threat of having to safeword once in a while. Or often. 

“I feel like you have some things you need to tell me. Things that are going to take some work.”

He grunts in agreement as she strokes his bare chest. 

“So you want me to get them out of you. I can’t promise I’m going to be fair.”

“That’s why I asked,” he tenses up under her touch. Arching, trying to feel more.

“But first, I’m sorry.”

His jaw tightens. He shakes his head.  _“You didn’t-”_

“Yes, I did. I did something  _really_  wrong. After our conversation about having all that out in the world, I should have known that it was safer for you to not be thinking about… _Kylo_  being used by someone close to you. Despite what you  _said,_  you were uncomfortable with me seeing it; but I took you at your word. While not a violation of anything you signed yourself up for, I should have taken it as a violation of boundaries, even if you weren’t watching. It was cruel to think that you weren’t, and I took it too far.”

He swallows, not looking at her. He doesn’t answer. Rey persists;

“And you don’t have to prove to me that you’re too strong to take it personally, or be forced to be cool with it because you don’t want to damage our partnership. I unwittingly set you up in that scene, physically or not, to the point that you had to safeword in a public way.”

“Why’d you do it?”

She sits back on her heels, sighing again. “I think because you want me to see you as two different people, and there’s this duality. Kylo and Ben. That there’s a trick to understanding them both separately. I think to prove that I could keep up.”

 _“I know you can,”_  he leans towards her. “Rey, I didn’t…it was unexpected, and a little too intense, but I didn’t safeword until that guy said that thing about raping you, it felt like…like I was being used against you.”

She takes a shaky breath, nodding. “Yeah,” her throat is dry, “I understand. But I still brought this all out to a place you didn’t consent to.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I’m confused about you,” she touches his collarbone, tracing the ridge, “And what you want from me.”

“I just want you.”

Her eyes are steely.

_“You never told me.”_

She sees him burrow back in his gaze, flinching away. Rey decides to change tactics. She crawls past his open knees and straddles his lap. 

He's looking at her lion thighs, tense when splayed across his hips, flexing tight around him to keep her balance. 

“How about for every question you answer for me, you get a kiss? You can’t lie, but you can say no to answering the question?”

She touches his cheeks, his brow, his lips with gentle fingers. 

“How will that ensure I answer the questions?”

His expression is defiant in the weakest way, he's already arching his neck towards her.

“Because of the kisses I’ll be giving you,” she sighs as she touches a palm to his pectoral muscle,  _“Hmm. You’re so soft, baby.”_

His hips flex underneath her, unconsciously lifting her closer to press against his body. She smiles down at her hand, bosoming the response to the nickname for later play. 

“Alright.”

“Good. What’s your favorite movie?”

_“Really?”_

“I spent most of the last three hours crying,” she says tightly, “because I thought I lost my best friend. You give me control: we’re going at my pace.”

“Seven Samurai,” he says coldly, and she presses her lips to his neck. He shudders. 

“So fucking soft,” she muses again. It relaxes him more than he’d like to admit.

“I like your apartment. Why did you never tell me you were so into film?”

“Because that’s not a part of my life anymore,” his tone is cold. 

He can hear his mother’s voice beginning a lecture she did in colleges across the country; “ _Visual language is the most powerful language we have. This is the only thing my biological father ever taught me.”_

When he looked at Rey, he saw happiness. He saw intimacy. But that was natural chemistry and a bond over one aspect of their lives. Which could have even made it a performance to his own eyes. Maybe that's why he had to help with her show; he was showing how she was portrayed every night. Empowered and beautiful and magnificent. Maybe he fell for his own vision of her. She became his Galatea.

But Rey is right here. Looking in his eyes. Present and open and trying. 

No. He loves the real thing. The one who full on belches while wearing lingerie and insists the stuffed animal behind her on her set is the reason why they've been experiencing a monetary upswing and can't eat anything like she's trying to kill it in her mouth. 

Rey rests her head on his shoulder again, weighing the response, and kisses his collarbone.  _“Mmmkay.”_

Her tone is a little annoyed that he shut her down. He still doesn’t add anything to the answer. 

She sits back in his lap. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to answer that.”

She purses her lips. 

_What if she didn’t get it. What if they had nothing in common. What if he said no and she got bored and found someone else._

She weaves her fingers into his hair, making him focus on her. Her lips brush his, but not enough to touch. Not enough, so it makes him dying to answer her next question. “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m mad at-”

She pulls away quickly.

“You can be mad at more than one person in the mess.  _Are. You Mad. At. Me?”_

He lets out a deep breath. 

“Yes” he drops his head back to brush the wall behind him. “I’m fucking  _pissed_ at you.”

Rey pauses a moment. “Good.”

He wasn’t expecting that. “What?”

She straightens her shoulders, “We need to talk about this. Because you would never, ever  _let yourself_ be mad at me before this.”

“Did you do this to-?” 

She presses a finger to his lips. “No.  _No._  I can genuinely fuck up every once in a while. This wasn’t about provoking you. This is about the progress we’re making. You trust me enough to be mad at me. This is a big deal for me. You never would have admitted that before, you were doing  _everything_  to not lose me and it made me so goddamn anxious.”

"Why?"

"There's such a thing as being too selfless, it got overwhelming. I didn't know how to reciprocate."

“Are you really fixating on  _my_  inadequacies?” 

She tilts her head. “No. But it’s kind of hard to face a partner where nothing you do matters because they will compromise their entire day, routine, or career over the things you want, but won’t even tell you the barest details about their life. I want to know who you are. I want the things I do to matter to you. I want consequences. I want us to respect each other.”

“You didn’t?” his voice falters. 

Rey makes a sympathetic noise and cuddles closer to him. “I respect you, baby. Of course I do. You’re so smart and talented and you want to do the best work in everything you do. I love that about you. I trust you with my business, which is literally operated out of my body. But you don’t trust me.”

“I do-”

“No,” Rey starts kissing his face, his cheeks, his brow, softly under his jaw. “Ben, sometimes you look at me like it’s my fault we aren’t together. Like I’m depriving you. But you never  _tried._  This is about you letting me into your life, because you didn’t let this happen from the start. You didn't share yourself, and I think you're fascinating, from the little you've let me in. Show me more, baby. Trust me.”

_The look she was giving him after that stream last week, where he had run off to wash his hands instead of staying with her and asking her what to do next. What she said after he raced out of her apartment, returning by desperately clinging to a peace offering of their old routine instead of telling her how he felt about this change. This was about his security. She was letting him take this as slowly as he needed._

_Her careful words as she ate dinner with him;_

_“How we tend to act like we’re dating even though we’re not?”_

Because she was trying to make him say  _“Because I want to date you, Rey, I love you.”_

And he barfed out some bullshit about  _filling emotional needs_  like they were each other’s placeholders. And then did everything he could to touch her without having to have that conversation, kept her primed in orgasms until she stopped asking. 

_“…You can’t even look at me….”_

_“…Ben, can we please talk about last night? Can we talk about what happened to us…?”  
_

Her phrasing was awkward when she first brought it up, as was the painfully awkward scenario, but he was the one to get up and  _go wash his hands_  of her after touching her for the first time since the incident and Star Destroyer. That maybe because of that incident she wasn’t exactly going to be dropping explicit hints in the early months, even if she felt that same way, because even if they were attracted to each other they couldn’t even  _talk about it_  yet. That was why it was so easy to lapse into half coworkers/half spouses, slipping back into the opposite sphere as appropriate. Rey was a proud person. She didn't _need_ anyone. That's what he liked about her; it's not about needing someone, it was about choosing each other anyway. Of trusting them to help without taking away your agency.

As though she reads him mind, she presses her brow to his. “I got lazy too. I thought eventually you’d break and it would all work out and we’d laugh about how clueless we were. But I’m not waiting anymore. I want you to let me in. Are we doing this?”

He doesn’t take a second to breathe before he whispers;

“But we can’t be together.”

Rey reacts as though she’s been slapped. He surges against the bonds for the first time, falling short of reaching her. He curses, closes his eyes. 

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” her voice is shaky but very careful. “But I want you to tell me why.”

She doesn’t get off of him, in fact, her weight feels heavier than before. She’s really pinning him down.

“Because you can’t…I can’t…I’ll hurt you. Like I did during the scene. We can't have sex. You even said one time afterwards that we would never fit.”

He thought he owed her love more than he owed her honesty. For once he keeps the first at bay. 

“Ben,” she groans, covering her face with her hands.  _“Oh my god.”_

She sounds  _fucking pissed_  at him. He can’t help but snap at her defensively;

“Is it so bad that it would kill me to ever hurt you?”

She uncovers her face, her hands shaking, her cheeks flushed with an anger he’s never seen come out of her.

“Are you saying that if you don’t get to put your dick inside me, none of this is worth pursuing?”

“I _-what?”_

“That’s literally what you’re saying,” she fumes, pressing her hands down on his chest, “that even if we can’t have penetrative sex,  _despite not even trying again by the way,_  none of the rest of it matters. Is that not what you’re saying?"

He, apparently, can get angry right back now. This is new. His anger rises to meet hers, their faces practically touching. 

_“I was trying to protect you.”_

“Bullshit. Ben, we haven’t even kissed in the last week and I feel more pleasure with you than anyone else in my life. Are you telling me that isn’t enough for you? That this,” she rubs up against him spitefully, but god damn if it doesn’t feel good anyway. He lets out a strangled moan, “Doesn’t count as sex? That nothing we've done counts? The way we fucking own each other? You really think that I need a dick inside me to be a valid girlfriend?”

 _“I thought this is what you wanted,”_ he grits out as she yanks the drawstring of his sweatpants loose. 

“No, you wanted to decide for me to spare yourself getting hurt. You didn’t even ask me what I really wanted. I was going through some stuff when we first worked together, not all of it was you-” she shuts herself up and shakes her head. _“I’m a lot healthier now.”_

“Rey-”

“What happens at Star Destroyer isn’t  _sex_  to me, Ben. You didn’t hurt me during  _sex_. You hurt me during a shoot where some asshole director was making you enter me in a certain way, and I wasn’t ready, and that whole fucking company was being irresponsible by hiring me and I didn’t know any better at the time.”

“What do you want?” he pleads, gripping the bedposts.

“I’m  _showing_  you what I want.”

She yanks his pants down, his cock springing free. “This isn’t  _enough_  for you?” she breathes against his shaft, her mouth sucking red circles up and down it. It’s so much better than Kylo. She must have moaned that out loud because he whimpers. Ben thrusts against her, the tip rubbing against the curve of her throat as she teases him. 

“What do you did you mean by ‘healthier’?”

She looks up at him with a stricken expression that fades and in an instant her camgirl serenity balms over her face. 

"I'm the one asking the questions. Now, would you like for me to suck your cock, Ben?"

"Y-yes."

But he doesn't want to leave that topic. She steers him far away from it, and he starts to get that power imbalance when someone won't tell you something so important. He was always quiet around her, he'd never seen how that can feel so withholding. 

“You know your safeword,” she snaps at him, her lips closing around the tip of his cock. She moans deeply at the warmth, her hand stroking the length as she swallows more down. He struggles in his bonds, trying to prevent his hips from snapping up and taking more of her throat. She moans louder when he realizes he does without meaning to. 

“It should have been you tonight,” she murmurs after she pops him out of her mouth with a hard suck on his sensitive tip. “It shouldn’t have been on camera. It should have been us.”

He wants to tangle his hands in her hair, spank her, press her head down to take him all the way inside. He wants to lift her body into his, cuddle her, stroke her soft skin and kiss her and do nothing else. 

He wants so much from Rey he only now sees he capped it off at what he thought he could handle. He can’t handle this. She’s doing a much better job of it. She ties him up and within twenty minutes she untangled the entire mess of their whole relationship, guts him from the inside out, and is giving him the best head of his life.

Rey’s mouth can take him  _deep._  Her hands stroke what she can’t take. There’s tight suction and throaty sounds that vibrate through him and his vision is whiting out and he wants to fucking  _die like this._

It’s fucking bliss.

"I want to cum," his neck is chorded with tension.

"Hmm, but I thought this wasn't good enough for you?"

"Rey, _you've made your fucking point."_

There's a laugh the brushes over his wet cock; “You are such a bratty sub.”

He’s so strung out on her smell and her sounds from the last few days that he fucking loses control of everything in a matter of minutes, despite his years of porn star stamina. Phasma would have him fired if she say him like this. Rey swallows most of it down, but with a mischievous smile, she crawls up to him and paints wet line of his cum across his chest and neck with her tongue.

“’But that’s not enough, we can’t do this,’” her tone is mocking, she hovers over his lips. All this without a first kiss. He’s dying for it now, but also scared it will end him. “You’re letting your porn speak for you. Get creative. I expected more from you.”

“Give me permission to try,” he seizes up underneath her, trying to clamp down on her body over his like a trap. “I’ll make it so good for you baby, you have to forgive me, we have to try.”

Rey's ripping at his bonds, her anger clear on his face. He curls his arms around her desperately. They're a little numb, so the hold is awkward. But she stays right there. 

“The only difference between Kylo and Ben is Kylo is you when the camera is on. Don’t use him to be something you’re not.”

He doesn't know who he is at all anymore when he pulls her in for a kiss. But he does know he's better.


	9. Use our eyes, throw our hands overboard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Hey all, note amendment to the tags in case this is a subject you aren't comfortable with, it's mentioned in a brief discussion of legacy between Rey and Ben specifically in the context of Leia's perspective).

“Question game?”

Ben can barely open his eyes. The sunlight is too threatening, even blocked by some heavy-duty blinds. He groans.

_“We’re not sixteen.”_

_“Question Game,”_  she snuggles him closer to her breast, and he loses the will to argue. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Red. _How far have you gone with a guy?”_  he mumbles against her tee shirt. He snuggles his head back down like it’s game over. 

Since Rey decided to sexually demolish him with the blowjob of his life, he's been too fucked-out to move, so he’s settled in the same position that they’d fallen in after their first kiss, her holding his weight between her legs with his head nuzzling her breasts. He keeps promising he’ll return the favor when he wakes up a little more but that was at two in the morning and so far not much has changed. Mostly because they keep falling asleep and it’s now about noon.

She laughs, light-hearted. 

“Me and one guy  _went to Ikea,”_  she nudges him with her knee. 

Ben lets out a soft groan. When they were in that store a few weeks ago she had kept calling it him taking her  _Ikea Virginity_ andwould meaningfully touch the pre-arranged room trimmings as though they were sacred tokens. He found it cluttered, but she seemed to be observing like she didn't know how to furnish a room. Then they built that stupid shelf so she could put her shell collection on it and drank the shitty beer she had stocked out of obligation to have alcohol in the house (neither were big drinkers to begin with, and she was a notorious lightweight) and admired the work they had done from the floor. Most of her "work" on the construction of that shelf was moral-support-based. He had leaned back against her bed and tried to ignore the smell of her on the quilt over her bed. Rey's room was cozy, full of personality. The opposite of his.

Last night he tried to wriggle free and touch her now and christen their new understanding that she was his girlfriend (unofficially) several times in the last few hours but she seemed a little gun shy after her display last night. He understands it. The sexual hangover for him is real, and the contact of their skin together is enough for him. “Favorite food?”

“I like sushi, or the occasional steak. What would you like me to spend the rest of the day doing to you?”

“Slathering me in affection,” she quips, her toes burrowing in the rucked-down sheets. He makes a quiet show of kissing her neck in obedience. 

“What’s your favorite part of my body?” she hedges, the innocence of the game lost somewhere in his mouth, like he sucked it out of her. 

“Currently, your sweet little tits. Ironic since I’ve yet to get to play with them.”

The Scene, as he has begun to call it in his mind, seems to universally _Not Count._ He’s fine with that, when he was eating her pussy then it wasn’t  _his_  Rey. It was the same thing he did every week. 

His Rey arches underneath him, slipping her tee shirt up over her ribs. He’s pinned her too much to get the hem any higher,  _or off,_  as she wishes. She gives an exasperated little flail to motion him to get off of her. He smirks down at her frustrated expression. 

“So you do want me to touch you now?”

“Yep,” she writhes a little bit, the mattress bouncing in her efforts. His weight above her becomes more lazily draped. There’s teeth cracking through the edges of the smirk, and more so at her frustrated sounds. 

“Poor baby,” his voice is mock sympathetic. Rey’s face flushes. “I tried to get my hands on you last night but you told me you just wanted to play with my hair and  _hold me_  for once.”

She was right to say it, their kissing ending with him so keyed up he clung to her shoulders and hips to make her whole body bend around him and begging  _“Let me touch you, Rey, let me eat your pussy until you scream, I want to make you mine, I want you to feel everything.”_

"This is enough," she threaded her fingers in his hair. _"Shh, Ben, when's the last time someone held you?"_

It was hard for him, she noticed. As he said he couldn’t feel anything until she did. Her months of faking it in front of him were probably why her frequent nudity in his presence led nowhere; she wasn’t interested in the sex she was simulating and so he fed off that energy. 

“And I did,” she arches her hips up, but the blockade of his abdomen between them is too hard to resist. He reaches carefully between them and unbuttons her shorts. “You were being so good for me then.”

“That only last so long,” he tells her smugly, stroking his fingers across her bare stomach. Her muscles jump under his touch. "My obedience goes away after a while."

“Even if I tell you I want to go slow?” she crosses her arms over her chest as he tugs at her shirt. He searches her face for coyness, finding none. “Even if I make you promise me that we do this the right way?”

He brushes her hair back, still pinning her down, but lifting his body enough to let her breathe. She hums appreciatively and he rubs circles over her hips. 

“Yeah,” he says thickly, “I promise.”

“I know at least four times a week you meet a girl and do every position with her for a marathon session, but for me…I wasn’t a virgin when I met you, but I think porn translates to everyone as  _experienced._ I’m not.”

There’s a firmness there, and insistence. He nods down at her, a lump rising in her throat.

“Tell me, baby,” he leans down to whisper in her ear. “Tell me everything about you.”

“Not much to tell,” she dodges quickly, hands curling at the base of his neck. He gives her a pointed look. 

“It’s not even worth mentioning,” she says, louder, a humorless expression on her face. He rocks his hips against hers. She glances away. “You know I've been on some dates in LA. I can't talk about work, so I had nothing to talk about. That rarely stopped them, they talked about themselves for an hour and then I'd go home. I had a high school boyfriend. Nice guy. Didn’t feel much.”

Ben smirks as he kisses her. “I didn’t even have a girlfriend in high school. Don’t be shy around me with that.”

She trembles as he shoves her shorts down her hips.  _“Just to feel,”_  he soothes, brushing his hands up and down her bare legs. “I just want to play with your tits right now. Is that okay?"

“Yes.”

She finally arches up to let the shirt go over her head.

“Why’d you change your mind just now?” 

He tosses the shirt behind him, dipping to kiss her face in his hands. His tone isn't accusatory, just curious.

“Because you were teasing, and getting me worked up, and it’s a lot. It’s a lot when you do anything to me and I…”

“I get it,” he smoothes his hands down her bare back. “It’s a lot for me too. If I didn’t know what I was facing first, I guess I’d be scared.”

“You have a plan?”

“Yes, baby,” he sighs, a rare smile from his own thoughts. “Today I’m taking you out on a date. But first I’m going to see if I can get you to cum from just playing with your nipples.”

Rey lets out a dubious whimper as his mouth closes around her breast. He groans mournfully for how long he spent not tasting her there. She's so tight and sweet, and sensitive. Sensitivity for everyone in this business vanished quickly, her squirming under his mouth is something he hadn't been able to make a girl do in a long time for real. Her hands close in on his hair, pulling him close. 

“We could be here all day for that,” she whines, and he moans:

“I know. I can't wait,” and continues sucking so sweetly her toes curl. He keeps it going with teasing swipes of his tongue until she fights him a little, trying to pry him off her breast. He latches to the other one, thumbs massaging circles on her ribcage as she arches. 

She whimpers when he pulls away. 

“Do you think you can, baby? Do you think we can make you cum this way?”

“I want to,” she moans softly. Her cunt is bearing down on nothing, pulsing into itself, and the tremors of which are not unlike the shocks of one. Maybe a little more. “Please make me. I want you to make me.”

It’s not  _how_  he’s touching her breasts; that’s the odd thing about how men perceived women’s arousal as a technique to master. She’d certainly known guys with no technique, but Ben was the same man as Kylo and when Kylo did this she had just tuned it out. That’s because she didn’t feel anything for Ben back then. But now, when it’s the Ben he knows-

She thinks it’s possible to cum from just this because it’s Ben. He's playing eroticism like it's something all linked together to please her begging pussy, and her pussy seems to trust he'll satisfy her. 

His eyes flicker up to hers. She knows it’s possible, and he pauses, lets a pleasured moan travel in a breath across her wet nipples. She arches up with a choked cry. 

His enjoyment of this is obvious and feeds hers. He returns his mouth to her left breast, fingers closing around her right nipple and squeezing, eyes locked on hers. He teases until the whole affair is uncomfortable, like an itch, and she’s struggling again under him.

She knows the second his mind is telling her to orgasm because it hits like an electric shock, her legs shaking. It’s not massive or overpowering, but it’s her pussy snapping its jaws for a touch from him, starved on pleasure and needing just a rub in the right spot, and she crosses her legs the right way and without a hand or anything against her clit that  _move_ sets her pleasured body into heat. 

…

“So, _film.”_

Ben groans around his spoon. He glances around the boardwalk, hunched over at a small metal table out side of the ice cream parlor. He’d promised her a date, but she didn’t want to stray too far from bed, the devious thing. Ice cream by the beach was all he’d seem to get out of her today. 

Rey soldiers on with a careful lick to the edge of her cone. Her expression is amused, eyebrows raised past her sunglasses. “I know you love it. You have like, the fully stocked system in your living room. There were enough movies in there that if you watched them back to back, you would never leave your apartment. What did you want to do, direct, act?”

He shudders at the idea of acting. His mother showed a few of her films at the end of Christmas parties that were dragging on for too long so people would want to leave. His father had worked on a few sets that hastily needed a child to deliver a line or two that he had been plucked up from his quiet corner to fulfill; his mother had a strength and defined camp presence that actually made her popular in academic social circles, his father had a natural charisma, he felt he inherited none of these things when other people’s words passed through his lips. Both of his parents had faced hardships in their lives that made them great artists, then they got married and built a better life for their kid who didn't have to face those same hardships and then wondered why no one understood each other.

“I’m not one of those porn stars that came here to be an actor,” his tone is annoyed. Rey raises her eyebrows at him. She removes her sunglsses. Her expression is clear;  _if you want me to understand, you have to fucking tell me._

“I was born and raised in La, for one thing. It’s a family thing,” he shrugs off her tenderer gaze that he’s giving a straight answer. “My mom was raised in the business, I mentioned the movies she did.”

Rey nods, a smile quirking on her face.  _“Bikini stuff,”_  she settles back into her ice cream to make him talk more. 

 “She met my dad when he was on the crew of this sci-fi movie they were working together. She’s a professor at UCLA now and writes a lot of books about film theory.”

“So why not go to UCLA?”

“Because I don’t want to enter this on her terms. Telling me who to work with. Course-correcting. She’s a feminist film professor, and when you can’t even be a stupid kid filming your action figures without some room to grow before she steps in and asks why all the aliens are male, it’s just a lot to live up to. If she had a tougher kid, I’m sure she’d have crafted the most perfect auteur on the planet. Her mentees always do really well, she’s been thanked in Oscar speeches. But when you’re her kid, it’s not a matter of spheres; professional and academic, political or personal. It’s everything.”

Rey is clearly biting her tongue, and masking her face in sympathy. He’s worried she’s thinking it’s rich people problems. It is, and she is. He can see that in her guarded expression.

So instead he prays she won’t hate him over rich people problems.

“What?” he recoils a little. 

“Your mother…is a feminist film scholar…and you do extreme bondage porn.”

“I had a reactionary phase, and I’m in a little too deep now to call her up for a reference.”

“No, no,” her tone is too casual. That bothers him. “I get the falling out, then.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Rey sobers at the implication that their strained relationship was more than the usual porn side career of disappointing one’s mother. 

“We…we had the real falling out about my grandfather.”

“What happened?”

He can shrug it off. Say it’s family stuff; money, not liking a new wife, not supporting dreams. But it’s Rey, and she’s looking at him with so much hope in her eyes…

“My biological grandfather…is a complicated figure in film history.”

“Okay…?”

“My grandfather was a German Director under the Nazi Party. Darth Vader. He made war films. He’s the reason that Nazi propaganda… _looks_  the way it does, has a sort of iconography. All might and nationalism. There’s a very specific…aesthetic to his films that on a purely technical level is genius. He could visually communicate a lot of implied power through a frame. And my mother hated him. Refused to accept that legacy. She basically built her career trying to deconstruct that sense of masculinity in film.”

“But you appreciate that.”

Rey is looking inside of him. This is what he’s terrified of, that he’s nudged too much out of the way and she’s going to invade him now. Even the stuff he’s ashamed of. 

“Objectively, he is a brilliant filmmaker.”

“For nazis,” Rey answers bluntly. He wonders how much she underestimated this as an ice cream conversation. Even now, they’re getting suspicious looks from one table over.

“On a purely skill level, I think his historical significance is important to look at without immediately writing it off. I’m not the only one who feels this way, a lot of schools of filmmaking technique believe this about him. You’d be shocked how much of his films are referenced in modern cinema, there’s homage everywhere.  _I despise his politics,”_  he feels weak even having to say it. Rey should trust that it’s a given. 

She nods, her eyebrows still poised. 

“So your mother wanted you to leave that legacy alone?”

“She was raised by a family friend after her mother died. Everything she did was absent of his presence. She did inherit a locker full of some of his work that was given to her when he died. She and my uncle chose to destroy it.”

“And this caused the falling out?”

“He died before I was born. Some researchers in London reached out to me when I turned 18 about any family artifacts I might be able to pass along. I tried to look into it, and found out that these personal archives got trashed by my mom and her brother decades ago. I didn’t think there was anything politically motivating my desire to preserve them. I just wanted them preserved to learn from them. She didn’t understand it.”

“And she didn’t understand the porn thing.”

“…yes,” he eyes her defensively. “I have a lot of regrets about that time in my life. My obsession with my grandfather’s talents definitely died down when I was out in the real world and was able to weigh things on my own, discover my own tastes. But that was years later and I was Kylo at that point and there was no going back. I’m big enough to admit that it was partially a rebellion thing; though I stand by my point that even propaganda is a part of film history; a big one. My mom had Battleship Potemkin on her syllabus for some courses, why not The Chosen Ones?”

“I think the artistic merit…” she tents a hand over her mouth. Her ice cream has melted all over her hand. She leans over and dumps it in the trash. “I mean, yes, it’s revealing of a perspective, but to what end? Cool, we sympathize with a Nazi.”

“I wish more than anyone else he wasn’t a destructive person with a hateful ideology, but even my mother would talk about the power of film and the moving image in reference to his work. How it can lie. I think it’s interesting.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand.” Rey’s tone is measured. “It’s like the porn.”

“It’s nothing like my porn,” he shoots back defensively, and Rey shrugs. 

“I mean, the propping up of masculinity and valor. Isn’t that what all the Kylo stuff is built around?”

Kylo’s entire persona was in celebrating his ruthlessness in the face of a beautiful, begging girl. He’d been subjected to the joke that male talent didn’t really matter, it was all about the girl, but faceless and impersonal as his presence was, it was still a man acting upon a woman as she screamed and finally went limp. Some of the shit he had filmed was really violent, and frankly nothing near what he wanted to introduce Rey into. But when he thought of exploitation and his scene partner Phasma, he knew of her constant maintenance of her control of the situation.

But Phasma so often was the one enacting sex on a third partner with him, also shot in low, intimidating angles to look more powerful. 

“It’s not just that, some people find it empowering, especially women. Isn’t that what porn is? Ignoring the darker implications? Suspending your disbelief and just letting yourself  _feel_  it?”

Rey looks out at the ocean, her face kind of closed off. He’s at her favorite place and dredging up all this shit for her. But she just seems to stir at the pass of a breeze over her face and calms the storm inside her.

“I get the purpose of a critical eye, not everyone is going to use it the wrong way. But a shot of a woman getting slapped and degraded in isolation is exactly that, even with her consent or her living a comfortable life off camera, and someone taking that the wrong way can be incredibly destructive. Context is personal. Viewership alters context. You calling me a whore during play is a mediated experience. Filming it for other people to process you calling me a whore as okay without context is different.”

He wants to interrupt that he would never call her a whore but she seems to want an engaged discussion, not a stalled one.

“But the production of porn does imply consent and mediation between performers, at least it’s supposed to. The acknowledgement that this is fantasy and no one is really getting hurt.”

She casts him a sad look. “I didn’t have that choice.”

Ben’s voice cuts out. He fumbles with a dirty napkin, Rey stares at the table. 

He still doesn’t know where she came from. His only clues are cigarettes, truckers, and never wanting to go back.

If he asks, he senses he'll know. He'll find out how much bigger her problems were. He'll feel impossibly small in the scope of her grief. And she leans across the table and picks up his cup of mint chocolate chip because this is a date and she wants to act like it. She gives him a sad smile. It's not time. 

_"Ugh, ask for mint chocolate **chunk** next time, there's bigger chocolate pieces-"_

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Ben points out, Rey sighs.

“Not in relation to you. I’m looking into…seeing if the clips Star Destroyer has of me can be taken offline. I don’t like them. I didn’t…” she takes another deep breath. “I didn’t have a choice in how I was being portrayed until I was camming. That  _scares the hell_  out of me.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, other than offer to drive her to Hux’s office to find the editor and the hard drive and smash everything in a vindictive rage. Even he knows it’s impossible in the looming face of the internet. He wants to give her her power back, and had been trying since the first shoot they did to give that to her. 

Rey reaches across the table again, curls her hand in his. 

“I understand that you wanted to learn where you came from. And I think I get your point, understanding is different than condoning. I’m glad you told me. Do you think it ever ruled over you, though? That past? Made you feel like you couldn’t be good?”

“Do you think I’m bad?”

She catches his chin in her hand, pressing her teeth into his lower lip. The sugar on her mouth mixes in with the kiss. He can’t help but shudder. Her nose strokes against his when she pulls away. 

Her tone accepts all of him, warm and inviting and trusting;

 _“I_  don’t think you’re bad, baby. But sometimes I think  _you_  certainly do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a huge, huge infodump and for that I'm sorry. Vader's presence in Ben's life was something I've been planning as a foil to how he views perspectives that aren't his own; so now that we have opened him up to alternative perspectives, this is stuff that has to be deconstructed inside of him. To be fair, it's a heavy metaphor but so is the First Order's fascism, and I never said I was doing this the easy way, sorry if you're here for just a smutty sexcam fic. It can be both. So when I get "what about Rey?" comments, it's because from my very personal feminist perspective, Rey is a more complete person despite her own damage. She knows who she is but not what she wants, I'd say Ben is the inverse of that. We're getting more about Rey and her damage next chapter (I've had questions about implied sexual assault and I don't like "surprising" people like that so no that's not what it is don't worry). 
> 
> And for those who fear I'm knifing them out of sex work in a "Scared Straight" kind of way, we will be unpacking various forms of feminist porn and how they factor into consumption in the next few chapters.
> 
> For updates on that, moodboards, or prompts, you can find me on my tumblr secretreylotrash.


	10. A rush at the beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: food issues mention, specifically malnourishment and mentions of rape as a recurring theme of porn and how Kylo is both complicit and negatively affected by that.

“Do you watch porn?”

His hands tighten around the steering wheel, but Rey is still casually splayed across his passenger seat, a drive-thru bag settled between her legs. The sun was morphing into a harsh orange that was surprisingly calming. 

“I _live_  porn,” he points out, and she smiles as she sneaks another fry.

He isn’t even lying if he had said no. The only thing to tempt him was her shows, and he was there for them in the objective light. It was like trying to watch a movie knowing too much of the behind the scenes; it’s no longer about story or motion or even pacing. It’s about how the cinematographer was on cocaine or the crew didn’t speak English, the actress thought the movie was about her character and then she’s only in one scene, recasting an Oscar winner who was tanking production for an unknown who would go on to reach critical acclaim. That’s the story. 

Then it’s not about the end of the movie; it becomes that the movie is made and that is the end.

“But you wanted me to watch other cams to learn about my competition,” she points out, “Do you try to edge out all the other porn stars?”

“The pool for guys is a lot less competitive. Show up. Can you lift the girl? Are you clean? Are you somewhat literate?”

“Nobody at Star Destroyer asked if _I_ was literate,” she counters with a small smile, but he can hear the hate in her voice.

Ben slows at a yellow light, not edging in fast enough before it flashes to red. Rey is chewing noisily, but she always eats like it’s the end of the world. 

“You’ll let all the heat out of the bag if you keep opening it,” he tries not to smile because he does find it unbearably cute. He doesn’t even want fast food, but his fridge is empty and she agreed to come back home with him. Groceries are a high priority for tomorrow. 

“I’ve seen porn where like, perfect ten little blondes are with guys with beer guts who are missing teeth. That’s when I decided watching it wasn’t for me.”

Rey can see the appeal of Kylo, though. He has an air of sophistication, his emotions are genuine, he almost takes it too seriously to give off that level of sleaze that did it for some but not enough women. Kylo didn’t play a predator with this ironic little smirk like he knew what he was doing was fake and fucked up. Kylo fucking committed. 

He seems to be pondering her example. 

“There’s more female-centric porn, more high end.”

“Nobody _pays_ for porn anymore, Ben. Don't be bourgeois.”

He laughs, nodding. “Hence the licensing deals. The official Kylo Ren dildo pays a lot of bills, baby. Maybe someday when we can all laugh about it you can use it to keep close to me when i’m far away.”

The wound is a little too fresh, and he’s being intentionally flippant. She can feel him trying to suck the words back in, return them to being unsaid.

Rey shudders, her nose wrinkling. “Ironically, the morning of our shoot, I was relieved I got you. Like  _‘oh, he looks like he bathes! he’s not forty! he’s cute! thank god!’”_

“You…you thought I was cute?”

Kylo had been someone of a marketing anomaly for Hux, one he was very forward;

_We don’t want to put you in pretty boy stuff because you do hardcore but you have the fans of someone in pretty boy stuff. Our hands are kind of tied._

“Yeah,” Rey’s voice is really warm. 

“I met you when we were already on set,” he casts her a cautious look, “right?”

“I saw you when Hux was showing me around the studio. He pointed you out, you rode your motorcycle to work that day. You were taking off your helmet in the parking lot, mostly I was nervous about how big you were, and then all this pretty hair slides out as you lift it off your head and I just…liked your face. I don’t know. It was one of those calming  _‘it could be worse’_  moments.”

Ben is quiet for a moment. 

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Rey drops the bag of food to the floor of the car, crossing her legs lotus-style in her seat. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

He fumbles with the turn signal, the car going a little to sharply around a corner. She grabs the handle of the door, waving off his whispered apology.

“No, I think it’s good for me to hear this,” he’s very soft-spoken after a few blocks of silence. 

Rey swallows. “It wasn’t about you being this monster tearing my body apart. It’s like…you know in bio class, when you had to dissect a frog? And if you liked your lab partner, you’d sort of breathe this sigh of relief? Like, oh, we still have to do something unpleasant, but okay, at least I’m doing it with them? That was more my reaction. It was like being paired with the cute jock. We still had to dissect the frog, though, and maybe we weren’t paired together for our compatible…frog dissecting skills… _ugh.”_

She covers her face in her hands. “I shouldn’t have been shooting boy/girl. They shot a turkey baster full of lube into me and it was still a disaster.”

“Oh.”

Ben is looking at the road, not her, which makes her heart race a little bit. She can feel him burrowing backwards into his dark thoughts. 

“Tell me.”

“I thought you were actually wet. At the time.”

Rey sighs. “Does it matter that much to you if I was?”

“Just some…professional integrity.”

Yes, it fucking mattered. It mattered because his own memory betrayed him like that. His character in the scene thought Rey secretly liked it, up to the obvious certain point. His character, the person he was just pretending to be.

She nods, “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

He nods as well, his grip on the wheel more casual, like the steady cruise through LA at sunset, avoiding the freeway and coasting through side streets. Such an idyllic place for such a painful conversation. 

"I didn't even _know_ you back then. I didn't even know your real _name."_

She digs through the bag at her feet for more fries. Her foot props up on his dash, heavy boot and all. He casts her a look, there's a smug smile on her face and she digs her heel in pointedly. Teeth close in on the fries dangling in her fingers.

His expression is openly annoyed; which she loves the chill she gets from it. A week ago he wouldn't have said a word, would have quietly cleaned up the scuff when she was out of the car and hid his irritation from her.

"Are you going to make me say it," he hedges, flicking his turn signal. 

"Say what?"

"Get your fucking foot off my dash."

His eyes flicker to her, slightly apologetic, but she scrunches down in her seat with a smirk. 

_"Uh-uh."_

"Rey."

"What?"

"Are you being a brat?"

She shakes her head, laughing as she digs into the bag for fries. He takes the bag out of her hands throws it into the backseat. 

He's in shock at her smile, this flicker up joy and excitement that melts into petulance. "Maybe I'm acting up for your attention."

"That doesn't sound like a good idea, Rey."

"Why not?" is very nearly a whine.

He grabs the knee that is rested on the seat in a vice grip, not the one leaning against the window because of her boot on his dashboard. She _loves_ his big fingers digging into her leg. The right kind of rough.

"Because you're testing me."

"Show me what happens when I do that."

"You want my fucking attention?" He unzips her shorts. He adjusts his hold in the wheel to drive one-handed. Rey coos excitedly when his hand shoves into her underwear. 

_Fuck, she's soaked._

And the point of the game is made; she's this wet for him, now, so stop being an idiot and fixating on the past.

He can't punish her when in actuality she was being _so good_ for him, luring him into her trap because _he needed her._

He curls a finger inside her, giving her the coaxing strokes he couldn't when she used his fingers to fuck herself a week ago. Rey cries out as he whips down the mountain roads to his apartment.

"You have to show me everything, don't you? You can't keep secrets from me."

Rey's whole body contracts at the threat in those words. That there were secrets. That she was going to have to tell him. She looks hopelessly in his eyes as he works her, her vulnerability a gift to him as he finally, finally reaches home and can park the fucking car and look at her. He's able to lean towards her and watch her writhe against his dexterous hand, her legs shaking as he slips in a second finger. 

She takes it, holding his wrist so he couldn't be cruel and take it away, staring down at the gear shift instead of him. 

"You will tell me, someday," he grabs her chin. "I need you to do this for it to work, too."

It's a thorough examination; cold and clinical but so fucking accurate she can't think of a lie to come up with. It's closing down around her; he knows she's not telling him something and there's nowhere to go but tell him. 

"Mhmm," she chokes out, looking so pinned and afraid and so trusting that he can't not launch himself to her side of the car and kiss her, her trying to clumsily accommodate as much as his body he can reach over. His seatbelt chokes him on the first try, but he digs the tips of his fingers into her g-spot as he fumbles the belt off with his free hand to return to her.

The insistent, quick quirk of his fingers as he focuses on his seatbelt is what actually sends her over, but he's free to catch her as she orgasms in his driver's seat, his fingers dripping with her, her entire body bent around his hand because it wants him.

She slumps back, her head knocking against the window behind her and her legs stretched in all directions in his car. Her hair has fallen out of its tie and she looks wild in the last of the sunlight. 

“Does it help at all that you make me wet now?”

He can't take his eyes off her, smiling shyly. 

“It does. It means a lot more.”

"Hold still," she orders, and she dives for the belt of his black jeans. 

...

They hastily eat the lukewarm food when they get to his place. He pours her a glass of wine and they lounge on his terrace. The sun has already gone down so it doesn’t seem the ideal time to reveal it to her, but she’s quietly observing the streets below. Seeming to notice this is something he had that she…didn’t.

"There's good porn out there," he muses, staring at the contents of his glass. She lifts her feet into his lap. 

She smirks at him; "If you say it's mine that will officially be the worst pick-up line ever."

He's trying to file down his argument, she she waits.

"I think it's more of a need-based market, though. Like, if we're getting technical, defining it-if we try to make it anything other than what it is, it's not porn."

"So we can't try to change it?"

“Is there such a thing as moral pornography? Isn’t it always something debased, and animalistic? Aren’t we pushing the definition of porn a little too far by trying to find our own brand of locally-sourced, home-grown, grass-fed smut and everyone is making their own homemade sextapes and having to tell us every detail of their personal lives in the making of this process? Mystery is sexy.”

“DIY porn,” Rey snorts, rolling her eyes. “I mean, technically that’s what _I do.”_

“What I’m saying is porn blends an instinct into a consumable product. Instincts are uncontrollable."

Her eyes narrow at him, the expression proceeding the comment is what causes his dread before she even speaks. “You said sex was psychological. You are the one who keeps making it this altruistic performance."

“I haven’t heard you complain yet.”

She laughs as she sips her wine. “No, don’t let me stop you. By all means, continue.”

“Can we do something crazy?”

Emotionally, after her hungry orgasm and the messy blowjob she gave, he’s a little raw. Watching the sun set in the way the light wired through her hair fanned across his lap was something he wouldn't forget until the day he died.

Rey smiles gamely.

“Tell me.”

He looks down at the tile below his feet. His shyness drives her wild with both curiosity and longing.

“Can we just go to bed tonight, like I’ve already fucked you a thousand times, and we’re home and we just want to sleep?”

For something so banal it sounds awfully romantic coming from him.

“Hmm,” she lifts her feet off his lap, where he’s been giving her a tentative foot rub. Then she sets her glass down.

“You just want to go slow?”

“Yes,” He admits.

“Tell me why, baby? Is it for me?”

She laces her arms around his shoulders. A lump forms in his throat as he shakes his head. She settles her legs across his lap and rests her head on his shoulder. He absently strokes the softness of her calves.

“Because I haven’t had anyone in my bed, just to sleep.”

He's ready for that now.

Rey’s eyes flicker with some kind of familiar pain. There's a sadness about her, in kindness instead of isolation, that makes him more afraid of his own. She's nice about how people can be lonely.

He's alone because he's lonely.

“Many bad things, Ben, have led me to you.”

And she weaves her fingers in his and leads him inside. Rey shimmies out of her clothes when they enter his room, opting for whatever he selects out of his drawers. Sweatpants that drown her. An overlarge tee shirt. She cuddles them to her chest as he hands them to her, still folded, brushing past to start a hot shower.

He can’t…he feels like he’s wasting something, guilty about his consumption of her devolving into a bedtime ritual to reveal his own sadness to her. He snuggles into her shoulder as the water pours over them. This should be bigger, be something sexual. People took their clothes off and fucked, didn’t they? Nudity was for touching. He didn’t know how to be naked as an extension of his mind, not his body.

But since Rey, who managed to get them to do all kinds of things in variations of dressed and clothed...she wasn't a girl on set who took off a sundress that had no underwear on underneath and initiated sex through...

Rey owns this, owns him. Vulnerable and so, so trusting. So beautiful. She's examining his body in a way that's intimate because it's not explicitly sexual. It's about knowing.

He washes her hair with trembling hands. She focuses on his back, his freckles coated with the slick of soap. He’s just watching her skin until it melts into something familiar. Like they’ve done this a thousand times.

Rey’s request for slow had terrified him that morning. That he could never get enough fast enough. But he never thought about what they didn’t have yet when they did this.

They slide into bed together, hearts pounding and a little too emotionally bruised somehow, even after so much knowing silence.  

Rey cuddles into his shoulder, her wet hair chilling his skin as it soaks into his shirt. He strokes her hair, she smells so good. 

"Pick a movie," she demands, and his heart lightens. He awkwardly reaches for the remote with her still in his arms. "Don't test me with some artsy bullshit I'm not supposed to like so you can sound smart."

He pinches her hips scoldingly, but selects _Spirited Away_  to stream because he's already thought to himself a million times it reminds him of her. 

She smiles at the choice. 

"Seen it?"

"Yeah."

But they watch it in companionable silence.

And this is what Ben needs. 

...

She startles him when the lights are turned out, he's not yet asleep but it bursts out her:

“I didn’t want to ever tell you about this.”

She pulls back and sits between his open knees. Her face is troubled.

Ben holds his breath. _A relationship, an illness, a barely suppressed hatred of him?_

“When we were first working together…when I was first starting out at Star Destroyer,” she licks her lips and stares out the window over his shoulder, face cast in a cool glow, “I came from virtually nothing. Fresh off the bus, typical pornstar cliche story. Except I didn’t want to be an actress. I just wanted money.”

She pauses abruptly:

“Have you noticed I’ve gained about fifteen pounds in the last few months?”

He immediately knows what she was talking about; he did notice. He doesn’t know why he felt ashamed for noticing, Rey was always gorgeous but in this case it was for the better; her breasts and ass filling out and her muscles toning up. He assumed it was that typical LA convert athleticism, and all the fast food. He was so used to how she looked now that when he tried to think of his hands on her during that scene he couldn’t place his Rey to the bony ribcage underneath him.

“You’re beautiful,” he blurts out, because he means it. She shakes her head. 

“I was underweight when I came out here,” she looks down at the sheets. Ben feels a bubble of pain almost lift him off the bed, “After I had a mandatory check-up at the clinic after our…incident, Dr. Kalonia explicitly told me I was malnourished. It was the first time that word had ever come up. I genuinely didn’t know, I just, you know…”

He doesn’t know. She seems to sense this. His quiet is the most poised thing in the room, he is reeling her closer with seductive silence. It terrifies her.

“It was all that I knew. My parents…shit.”

She covers her temples with the flat of her palms. Ben reaches for her in a tight hold around her body. She feels so impossibly small now that it makes him utterly sick to picture her _smaller._

 _“Still can’t say it out loud,”_ she jokes mirthlessly.

It's a lot to say it, even this. And there's what she can't say.

That the dilapidated house was like a port of coming and going addicts. Since she was old enough to be distinguished as a girl by some of those seedy men it was like a countdown until she turned 18 and after 16 it was like there was blood in the water. That her body had an implied use from an early age, and the gray-haired women around her were a loaded threat that this is what she would be when she got old. That she spent her entire teens trying to get out and no matter where she hid her savings her parents would find it and blow it all on drinking money. That it was a lot of ramen and wonder bread or whatever the fuck she could find and she didn't know her body hadn't liked the little it got.

That she learned to fight early and she's tired of fighting; so porn seemed like the obvious choice. 

_“They neglected you, didn’t they?”_

He feels it, so often, in her sadness. But he didn’t see this picture of her life, his only point of view his own. It was like her parents, the vague image he had, filled his own family dinner table; just with different accents, different jobs, but the same seating arrangement, the same arguments as his family life. He pictured a meal on the table and a stocked fridge and a house with a lot of space and a lot of silence.

But he feels it now, in the open longing often on her face, in her utter savagery over food, in how she can’t seem to piece some of his pain to hers in a matter of balance.

Rey's life has not been fair. More unfair than his. And her fear is obvious; he won't know how to shoulder that weight with her because he isn't used to it.

She neither confirms nor denies his assumption.

“This is not entirely your fault, but it’s important for you to know that my body wasn’t functioning properly. I…okay, being at that weight, it affects everything…there’s a lot to hate about your body, but a specific symptom is vaginal lubrication is nearly impossible, so arousal,” she waves a downturned, flat hand in a horizontal line, “It’s not coming.”

The controlled silence from his side of the bed is killing her. She can feel his heat in the dark, something sinister in his anger, and it puts her back in that body that couldn’t take care of itself again.

“You had trouble achieving a proper state of arousal before you entered the sex industry.”

Rey chews her lower lip. “Yes,” her voice is small.

“Star Destroyer hired you anyway?”

“It wasn’t about _proving your arousal,_ ” she shoots back. “They hardly checked for that part of my resume. All porn stars fake it.”

His hands grip her folded legs above the knee. He sits up, pulls himself closer to her. “Did they know you were underweight?”

“A casting agent mentioned it may be a problem, Hux dismissed it. He referred to me as an ideal body type.”

Rey breathes out slowly as she feels the shift of his coiled rage. It’s like straddling a wildfire, or cuddling a panther. It’s a little too much but impossible to escape.

“I thought my disinterest would help me detach during scenes. There were a lot of factors at play as to why that was painful for me, but my physical health was a huge indicator of how that day went down. Dr. Kalonia declared me unfit to return to set. Star Destroyer did not care.”

“They wanted you to keep working or completely undermine your career.”

“So when you decided to help me,” she touches his cheek, “you helped. You helped more than you knew.”

Making sure she ate. Keeping her on a schedule. Taking care of her body with ice and knee braces and hot showers. 

No one had ever cared for her before. 

“I helped break you,” he says quietly, his voice catching with anguish.

She shakes her head.

“That check-up at the clinic was maybe the first doctor’s appointment I had been to since I was born. There was a lot that no one else was…handling it, with me. But it was what needed to happen. Dr. Kalonia’s been monitoring my health, I see a therapist once a week. At first I was really angry about it, Kalonia suggesting counseling, because, well, if what happened to me was bad enough to warrant counseling, then why would-”

“Because of me.”

“Ben,” she cups his face in her hands. “No. That’s not what this is about. You need to stop hating yourself for us both being put in a potentially dangerous situation. This is about opening your eyes, baby. That I forgave you a long time ago.”

“I’m not the victim here.”

“Neither am I.”

He thought of a shoot with Mila from a few weeks ago. He always liked her, her casual attitude and wry smile.

_“You okay?” she asked him as they were toweling off._

_“What do you mean?” he replied._

_She shot him the first pitying look he had ever received as a male porn star._

_“Because that’s some pretty dark shit, back there. No one ever asks **you** if it feels wrong.”_

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. Rey lets out the breath she’s been holding.

“Ben, you simulate rape for a living. That’s going to have an affect on you, whether you admit it or not. You’re lonely.”

“So are you.”

“I’m not lonely,” she says, “I have you."

He hadn't known what Mila meant, or if it even applied to the playing the role of the attacker. But it made sense. His entire persona was built around a man who fucked women who were paid to beg him to stop. 

And he didn't think twice about it until one of them meant it.

Rey twists away and he protests, but she's sliding back under the covers by his side. She cups his face in her palm, stroking his cheek with her thumb. He's breathing so heavily, she's scared he won't sleep tonight. 

"How do I fix this?"

She snuggles close and lets his arms tighten around her. "You can't. It's the past. So we're just going to move on."

"Rey," his tone is desperate, clinging to her, "what do we do?"

She shakes her head. "There's nothing to do. We're going to go to bed."

She presses her lips to his. The kiss is sweet; he should have stolen more since last night but he can't let himself believe that things are different. But things are better, and how they used to be...he hadn't known the whole story. He couldn't believe anyone could have her and treat her badly. 

As she snuggles closer, he knows without speaking what she means; _You have me. Don't waste it._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all; for any questions of Rey's weight; it would be a canon reflection of Rey being underfed; not of Daisy's real-life body. Rey at this point in the story looks like Daisy' Ridley's healthy body type, imagine her at her lowest a good deal smaller than that.


	11. megaphone to my chest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few chapters ago, I got one of my favorite comments on this story, point-blank asking me the very important question; ‘just *how* big is Ben’s dick?’
> 
> And my answer to that is, though slightly paraphrased here, ‘whatever a little ‘too big’ is to you, the reader.’  
> That’s my intention as a writer when I’m being vague; that this is a mediated experience that I don’t want to push anyone into just my perspective. This, selfishly, comes from the intention of not isolating the broad range of people coming to this story. So when I’m being vague on “just *how* bad is the content of Ben’s porn?” I meant “Whatever you, the reader, can handle.”
> 
> However, my vagueness about the content of Ben’s porn career did open up a problem; what Rey’s comment about ‘simulating rape’ means. 1. I fixed the tags to reflect this, and will be more aware in the future. 2. Here’s what I mean: specifically from Rey’s perspective, it kind of means all porn; the medium. This comment is how Rey feels about the industry and while she has a point, it is just from her experience. I was referencing, in general, scenes that do not explicitly intend to depict rape that still have an underlying consent issue; a woman who ‘says no but means yes’ in a scene directed by a man. Or it can mean from a filmmaking standpoint the way women are framed; often looking distressed or helpless. These things are toxic staples in heterosexual porn, specifically geared towards men. It speaks to the logic of porn: actors consent to have sex, so their characters have more space to roam how they get there in the ‘narrative’, nothing is treated as immoral, so without meaning to, we are often seeing a depiction of what is technically rape and it is not treated like it is because porn is without implications to many people who consume and create it. To clarify; this problem with depictions of women and their agency is where Rey is coming from; not from Kylo having an exclusive contract to do rape scenes or even an intention to depict the sex he has as non-consensual. Just that this happens, a lot, unintentionally, from “How do I pay for this pizza?” to hardcore BDSM. Specifically, the line about women "begging him to stop" was a BDSM distinction; there is a safeword and performer consent holding the entire practice together no matter what else is said, usually in the context of control of pleasure and pain. Rey's comment is that what is said, though fake, still may negatively impact him, and it comes from a place of genuine worry. Porn is a forward moving medium where a lot of the “story” doesn’t matter and gets made up on the spot to push through to the literal climax. This is my definition of his complacency; in the framing of the scenes Hux and the production company direct. We will address this complacency, because it still isn’t good, in the coming chapters. Some people want Kylo to not be as bad as that, some people want him to be as bad as he can be; anticipating this, I left it vague. Trying to curb reactions to keep everyone happy was an idiotic move on my part for this subject matter, selfish, and fucking irresponsible. For that I am deeply sorry. 
> 
> Leaving this unclear was not the right way to handle things, writing on a chapter-by-chapter basis I knew I was getting to the clarifications but when I lose your trust before then, it doesn’t matter ‘what I had planned’. I am so sorry for leaving that window open to people who have strict boundaries, to people who find this topic squeamish, and to people who need to heal, without me first altering the tags *before* posting it. It is an irresponsible way of handling subject matter that requires better execution. You deserve better. I apologize from the bottom of my heart.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,”

Soft lips press to his.

“Wake up.”

He groans, despite being a disciplined early riser it feels  _ungodly_  so at this hour, but Rey is up and fully dressed, barefoot and crouched at his side of the bed. 

“I have an appointment,” she says grandly, her smile shy. 

_Please let me keep waking up to this._

He closes his eyes, shakes his head, and nuzzles closer for another kiss. He listens to her words, hidden under a murky level of sleep and sex, between kisses.

“I have to go home and get dressed. I’ve been wearing these clothes for two days.”

“No you don’t.”

_“Have a good morning,”_  she says, her voice fading down his hallway. “I made breakfast.”

He chases the smell of her out of his room, but she’s already gone and the kitchen is full. A post-it note on the front door invites him to come over to her place tonight. 

She made  _everything_.

It’s not just some post-adult-sleepover eggs; it’s that and bacon and muffins and fruit and coffee; most of which she’s put a good dent in on her own, but it’s still too much food for even him. There’s a market around the corner, but when did she wake up to stock his empty fridge?

It pangs in his chest, the feeling of being cared for. He’d made himself scarce and then intentionally unwelcome from his mother’s home for the past ten years. His one night stands and sexual relationships were on such a tight leash that he never woke up to breakfast. He can’t remember the last time someone made it for him.

But it’s still Rey, in her own way; she didn’t do the dishes for him. They’re piled in the sink with an orange post-it that reads  _But I’m not your fucking maid_. He more than earned that from what she left him behind. 

He breaks the top off a banana muffin and chews until his mouth goes dry at another thought. 

Oh shit. 

He has a shoot today.

…

The nun is eating a yogurt with a milky residue coating her mouth. Rey watches in horror from the other side of the waiting room. She swallows down the bile that rises in her throat from when she was within smelling distance of the ambiguous dairy to tell the front desk that she was here for her appointment with Dr. Skywalker. 

She’s let in with a somewhat pointless ten minute wait; with clearly no one else coming or going. Instead of starting and thereby ending earlier, there was a power play in making her calm down in his waiting room until her appointment officially was scheduled. It annoyed the hell out of her, thereby destroying his plan, but it did make her have to sit still and breathe for fifteen minutes, which became part of the routine until he finally lifted his ass off the yoga mat he was clearly napping on and cleared his throat to announce she could come in.

“You were wrong about him,” she smirks at him, flopping down onto his couch. He opens his mouth and closes it when her hand dives into the bowl of M&Ms he started keeping on the coffee table of his office the appointment after she mentioned her food issues. They were usually gone by the time the hour was up.

“I highly doubt I was wrong about him, but I’m sure you got your validation from a positive outcome in doing something reckless.”

Rey smiles as she eats her candy.  _“It went very well.”_

Her therapist closes his eyes and lets out a pained sigh. “You don’t need to tell me more.”

“But I can, because I’m paying to.”

She smirks as her back teeth crack the shell of the candies. 

“You seem more impertinent than usual.”

“That’s because I’m… _happy.”_

“I’m aghast,” Dr. Skywalker appears to be doodling on the borders of his notebook. “You seem unfamiliar with the sensation.”

“It’s new,” she shrugs. Something seizes in her throat. Reality sets in. It’s new. It’s really, really new. 

“Do you think you don’t deserve it?”

Luke’s tone is bored, and this is a rote, therapy cliche that sends her hackles up. Her first session he called her a  _rose-colored-glasses-little-shit trying to hide her anger issues_  and that’s the only reason why she came back. She didn’t want inkblots and  _let’s unpack this._

Rey crosses her arms and leans back in her seat. 

“That’s such a bullshit question. Men never get asked that question. I’m really tired of being expected to act broken over my past, that I’m supposed to hang my head and ask why people are good to me because I wasn’t taken care of. It’s like you’re expecting me to act damaged all the time. I deserve things. I deserve the fucking sun.”

Luke’s pen goes still.  _“Alright.”_

“What, just because I came from absolute shit means I can’t move on from it? That I can’t go forward with peace and  _purpose-_ ”

Her brains stalls out a minute and her breath starts shuddering. It feels like she's choking.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Why was she letting this ruin so much for her?

“Just because they treated me like I was _nothing,_  I’m  _somebody.”_

Luke nods. “What does that have to do with not deserving your happiness?”

_“Because they kept that from me my whole life and I don’t know what I’m feeling now that I have what I deserve,”_ She covers her mouth with her hand.  _“Fuck._  You  _asshole.”_

Luke doesn’t seem to mind, glancing up at her.

“So do you think, that with everything you earned for yourself, _that you do deserve,_ by the way, is what makes you incredibly cautious of this happiness someone else gives you?”

“Fucking _asshole,”_  she continues, blotting tears from her eyes. 

"You can't control that he makes you happy and it scares the shit out of you."

"I just keep getting my hopes up."

“Because you can’t control being left behind, even from people who claim to love you.”

“That hasn't happened yet.”

Luke nods. “It’s not. But you think it’ll happen someday?”

Fuck. _Fuck._ She was being Miss-Fucking-Breezy-and-Casual with Ben because he acknowledged that they needed work, like she was sure he was going to get bored of that when the sex happened and move on. He was gutting himself at her feet and she fucking accused him of-

Being no better than the person she had also insisted he never was. 

"Porn has a baseline issue with narrative consent, because the people watching know it's really actors in front of a crew and it's fake and they trust these production companies to do their job" she says quietly. Her face scrunches up in shame. "I...I said something horrible. I told him he simulates rape for a living."

"You've expressed that opinion of pornography before in your own experience, which is why you chose to have more control through camming, if I'm correct."

_"Yes but why did I tell him that?"_

"Why did you feel like you had to tell him that?"

"Because," this part is true, "I am scared of how that might impact him."

"I think that's a compassionate way to look at it, but are you helping or are you _fixing?_ You can't fix a person. It removes their distinction as a person in your eyes, they just become something to manage. If you do push, he could surprise you in the wrong way."

_"Fuck."_

She shoves a fistful of M&Ms into her mouth. Luke raises his eyebrows. 

"You might have also told him because you want him to understand where you're coming from?"

"Yeah, sure," she waves him off, burnt out. She didn't want to make Ben _quit._ She just...hated Star Destroyer. It was a complicated feeling, both of them not knowing how to address that he still worked there, not this was still his career but that it was there. He took to her boundaries so readily, maybe she never gave him the benefit of the doubt to discuss boundaries with the women he was working with. 

That and all of Hux's conniving emails to try and get her to come back and work with Kylo.

_I've been watching your shows. You've taken about his size on camera before at this point. There's no stretch of the imagination that you could do it, and you've proven on your own you two work so well together._

"He still needs to respect your opinion on this, Rey. Maybe next time frame this as how you feel instead of a criticism of his actions, but this isn't about walking back your stance because you introduced it the wrong way."

“What do I do?” she finally mumbles, her heart racing.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. We spent like 36 hours straight together. My parents never even stuck around for 36 hours straight. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what _we’re_ doing.”

“Is there a demand from him to know what you’re doing?”

She bites her thumbnail, nodding with her eyebrows raised. “Not really, actually. It’s just sort of…figuring it out together. Writing the rules as we go.”

“Then cross that bridge when you come to it. Be in the moment. Connect yourself with your surroundings, because in the very least even bad surroundings made you what you are. You’re happy because of someone else. Try it out.”

“Okay,” she half growls at him, but she’s laughing the relieved laughter of someone who doesn’t care anymore about the reason they were just crying. Luke gives her privacy by continuing to doodle. Damn it. His fake-ignoring her routine really does wring the truth out of her  _every time._

“There is one thing…” she adds.

“Yes?”

Rey cracks a shit-eating grin. “He has issues with his mother.”

Freud-Hating Dr. Skywalker just keeps drawing, not even looking up. “Even I will tell you that’s a bad sign.”

…

The transition from Ben to Kylo is marked by strict routine. He works out. He showers. He meditates. 

Then he gets on his bike to go to wherever set is that day, instead of his car. There’s a vulnerability and rawness in the ride on his motorcycle instead of being in that contained space. It gets his adrenaline going.

But now he wants that space. 

Like a prima donna needing her dressing room or a soap opera star screeching for her own trailer; Ben now needs some fucking privacy to perform this transformation. It is his first diva move in his very long career. And all he has got for a space of his own all the way in  _fucking Malibu_  is a bike on its kickstand and maybe a helmet. A magician’s assistant trying to shuffle his head, legs and torso into different sections of a matchbox. 

He has to excuse himself from set when it becomes apparent that this professional transformation is signaled by one thing, and that one thing is not going to well today. 

This has never happened before.

He sits back against his bike in the driveway of a beautiful mansion in Malibu. It’s too hot outside to try and tempt fate. Hux gave him the rundown of the scene; He and Phasma  _“seduce”_  their nonexistent child’s baby sitter. Because there’s no script, no one ever really knows what they’re signing on for. 

But in a way, he does. Since last night, a comment he was initially defensive of from Rey starts to make sense. She didn’t mean she hated  _the script_ (seeing as there rarely was one) of the scenes he did. She hated the framing, the masculinity she compared to his grandfather’s propaganda. He was usually standing, mostly out of frame, foreboding. The women he worked with were on their back or their knees or stomachs. A celebration of masculinity, but in doing that, demeaned femininity. It’s telling the audience something; that this is sexy. And it’s showing something else; that one person is powerless. It is a visual medium. It is what it looks like. This was Star Destroyer. Scenes depicting consensual sex with words in the title like  _ruin_.

He blew a relatively vanilla scene. Three people in a mostly-window living room trying to finagle three bodies around a sectional couch. No one was even tied up. No one was even  _touching_  him yet. The thing that got him was the dialogue.

“I don’t know,” the girl on the couch cast her eyes downward coyly, licking her lips despite whatever Hux vaguely instructed her to say, _“I don’t want t-”_

_“Shit.”_

“Kylo?” Phasma had her tits out, and you don’t ruin a scene when Phasma had to stand around naked waiting for your mistakes to get fixed. 

_“Don’t say shit like that,”_  he snapped at a girl just doing her job, his cock ice-water-flaccid. Then he stormed out of the house. 

The last thing he hears is the girl who has more professionalism than him in four weeks of experience than his _many_   _years_  say  _“Oh my god, I was acting, did he think I was serious?”_

He barely gets a pair of jeans on before stalking to his bike. Before he thinks better of the idea of dragging her into the world he’s intentionally kept her out of for months, he’s dialing Rey’s number. 

“Hello?”

He almost loses his nerve. Ben shuts his eyes tight. 

“Hi. I’m at a shoot in Malibu.”

“Okaaay...” her tone is slow but it isn’t annoyed, but more like ‘ _Why are you telling me this?’_

“I forgot to tell you. I didn’t want you to think I was hiding anything.”

“Ben, you don’t need my  _permission_  to do your job.”

“Okay.”

There’s an awkward pause. Rey seems to let out a breath she’s holding.

“It’s my fault, I peeled out so quickly this morning that I didn’t give you time to tell me. I feel…a lot, around you. You get it.”

He laughs for what feels like the first time in forever. He feels relief, he feels happiness, he feels like shit because he has to face his own decisions any minute now and he’s one thread from snapping to give it all up for her. 

“I do, baby,” he chuckles and closes his eyes. “I really do.”

“Sorry for running off. Come over after work,” she seems to be shuffling things around in her arms. “I wanna cook for you again. Fuss over you. I bet you’re going to have a long day and we haven’t done anything sexual in my bed, I-” her voice is hushed, shy,  _“I want to.”_

That solves a lot more of his problem than she may know.

“Uh, Rey.”

“What.”

“Like what?”

“Like-” he hears her put her bags down. Groceries, her kitchen. He can see it. He can see himself sneaking up behind her and kissing her neck. Peeling off her clothes. Lying on the tile floor while she rides him, something sweet baking in the oven. He wants everything at once. “Aren’t you on set?”

“I need your help.”

He hears her pause, something catching in her throat at his severe and embarrassed tone. 

“So… _this never happened before_ , I’m sure.”

Her voice is dry and amused.

He groans, tangling a hand in his hair. “Please, baby?”

She seems to think about this for a minute. Maybe its too much, asking her to enter this mental space. But she sort of laughs, clearing her throat.

“Pretend we’re watching it together tonight. Be the guy I want in that movie, Ben. Make it like you know I’m watching. Be the guy that makes me wish I was  _that girl_.”

He can see her, rolling on her side, pressing pause on the remote, pulling him close with her hungry expression. There's an implication there; be better than before. He swallows. She keeps going. She doesn't _mean_ it, but he hears it. 

“You haven’t…eaten my pussy yet.” He hears her swallow next. 

“I want to.”

“I’d like that.”

“Good,” he’s smiling in spite of himself. 

“Maybe when you get here tonight, if you’re very nice, and you kiss me the way I want and say all those dirty things that make my legs open for you…”

“I love my dirty girl,” his voice cracks when he says it, “I love how she wants to be good for me.”

“I may be shy about it, because this isn’t what good girls do.”

“My good girl does,” he promises.

She laughs at his reasoning, heartily at that.

“Better?”

He has to walk onto set with his dick hard in his jeans like a teenager with no self control, but yes.

“Better.”

…

Phasma isn’t amused when they wrap for the day. Her voice is cool and contained, but if he’s learned anything about her in all this time, she can hide when she’s  _pissed._

“Smoke with me,” she says breezily from where she’s parked herself by his bike. He takes a deep breath. It’s not an offer, or a question. No easy escape.

“Sure,” he picks up his helmet, realizing this might be more of a self-defense thing. He hasn't smoked in a long time, a pretty impressive cold-turkey quit because it was affecting his stamina. But he can't really turn down an order from her. Phasma rubs her middle and ring finger under her eye, smudging the thick black eyeliner that always rings her lashes. She looks tired, with her signature silver hair sticking up every which way. Like it’s been a long night; not a five-hour shoot in Malibu. For a minute he does feel bad; Phasma worked hard, and he was not being fair to her for the work she put in.

If Ayn Rand were a porn star, she would be Phasma. There was a thesis in there somewhere, and he stored it in his secret thesis drawer that he kept in the back of his mind since he was twelve and he told his mother his idea about how masks in horror movies didn’t just disconnect the audience from a villain, but disconnected the villain from the humanity of their victims. Leia had nearly steered the car into a tree. 

_“Yes, you are **on to something.**  I hope you have this written down somewhere-”_

He has a mild respect for Phasma on paper, maybe even described in a novel somewhere. Something less visceral than audio and visual, because the second she makes that pissy face at him and opens her mouth he just wants to be anywhere but there.

“You were a mess today,” she doesn’t even pretend this is about something else. 

“Yeah,” his voice is quiet. There’s no denying it; he had to take a mid-shooting “break” and beg Rey for another shot of canned arousal that she sent in the form of a relatively tasteful nude of her in her bathroom. She was wearing a top hat and had drawn a mustache on her face with shaving cream. The text underneath said  **TASTEFUL NUDE.**  She looked like a slutty Monopoly Man. He would have to remember to tell her he was in love with her later. 

It had just barely gotten him through the afternoon. But not just because of her. He’d actually pulled the younger actress playing the babysitter aside, a nice girl whose name he learned was London, and asked her not to say any ‘hard no’s in the scene if they were going to be ignored. It was how Hux directed. It was the law of the universe. The goal was fucking. 

“I know I sound like a fucking high schooler,” he tensed his jaw, “It’s just,  _this never happens to me,_  it’s just  _gone_  when it feels like, you know. So can we, um, pretend your character has a secret crush on my character or something?”

Growing a conscience  _fucking sucks._  Could he reasonably spank Rey for making that happen without feeling like a complete bastard?

London actually visibly brightened at the suggestion.  _“I can work with that.”_

Her tactic was mostly licking her lips at him more, and  _a lot of nodding_  which he actually found kind of sweet of her to consider, and talking less, which he was sure his mother would also object to silencing the perspective of a 24-year-old babysitter getting caught masturbating on the couch of her employer’s home. 

“Why aren’t we telling  _her_  story?” echoed in his ears a few times that afternoon. Rey had opened floodgates of things he had been ignoring for years. Was it morally wrong to spank her even if she was right just because it annoyed him?  _Kink forums did not prepare him for this._

Phasma kills any of that bitterness towards his mother or adoration towards Rey with a glare, arms crossed, and he’d kind of like Professor Organa taking this case on.

_“And you’re on your phone a lot.”_

He rolls his eyes heavenward as he lights his cigarette. She’s probably never even seen him  _text_  on a shoot before, he was hardly tanking his career. But she’s right, he was constantly reaching out to Rey, which was such a red flag someone was quitting the industry for love pretty soon.

“So if there’s someone got you literally going soft I would advise you to get your fucking act together and be a professional.”

“How I enjoy our talks,” he murmurs, and her lips purse around the cigarette. There’s a red flare of the ash and she takes a deep breath.

“Don’t be petulant,” her tone does not invite argument. 

“Do you ever think about the scenes we do?”

“Not for a second longer than I have to. My job is to arch my back the right way so my stomach never has rolls and get a Brazilian every two weeks. They’re not paying me for an ethical breakdown.”

“But some of the scenes-”

She whips her cigarette onto the ground, stepping on it with a pristine sneaker. She points back at the house where the deed went down today:

“I know that’s not how you tip a babysitter. I know  _I’m_  never going to fuck my landlord when my rent is due. I know when your boss offers you a raise if you fuck him, that it’s sexual harassment and coercion and you report it to HR, not smile and blow him. I know teachers can’t fuck high schoolers because  _it’s a crime;_  even if they’re in detention. And yet millions of people watch it and society still functions. I'm an adult who made this choice for myself. So are you. You knew what this was. You knew what you were signing up for. It’s fucking  _fake,_ Kylo.”

“You’re right,” he withdraws. He stares at the helmet in his hands. The embodiment of his transition to Kylo. He wants to fucking crush it against the blacktop. There is no single right way to do this. Phasma had her way. She was a dom, and a fucking good one. She had the privilege of looking powerful on camera in a way most women didn’t. No one saw her without her strength. Mila had hers too. She would blithely say  _“gotta do it for the pervs”_  and smirk at Kylo before immediately faking a mind-breaking orgasm when the camera came on and go back to her bliss in the real world with a maturity he respected.

They had assured him it was fine. He knew how the sausage got made, but he never saw who Star Destroyer was  _feeding_  it to. What it looked like on the plate. 

Sometimes even Rey acted like she didn’t want to do something on a stream, coyly stretching the tension of almost saying ‘no’ for the tips to get her to change her answer to _yes._ But she also turned off the camera when she meant it. He didn’t know where the line  _was_  anymore, just that Star Destroyer had dragged him past it.

Phasma is giving him a look, one that might even be strong enough to make his decision for him. He must have been ignoring the input of women who were stronger than him for a lot longer than he knew. Shutting them out because they scared him. Because he couldn’t feel powerful if they threatened him. 

First his mother, now Phasma, and he was finally seeing all this because Rey shot a fucking arrow into his chest. Rey, maybe the strongest woman he had ever met, couldn’t fix him. He had to do this on his own. 

Her expression is unflinching, looking dead in his eyes.

"If you do something I don't want you to do, I will let you know. That is part of the trust of the scene. If you don't think your partner will tell you, that's something you need to work out _immediately."_

Phasma pulls out her car keys. It’s the only personal thing he’s ever seen of hers; there’s an LA Roller Derby Keychain, a roman discus from The Getty Museum, a photo keychain of her in full army fatigues posing with two other women soldiers, flexing in a desert somewhere. He thought the bruises were just from shoots, but clearly she had a life outside of this. Her next statement is punctuated by the jingle of all the metal as she presses the unlock button to her car. 

“Suddenly you start dating someone and you decide to grow a conscience about it, and you sit here and try to make me feel ashamed of what I do? Fine. Demean me for doing something you can’t handle anymore. Just don’t show up on a set with me until you can fucking handle your shit.”

He doesn’t _like_ Phasma; but he fucking respects her. 

…

Rey perks up when the front door opens. Ben on the other hand, notices she is still camming, and is mostly annoyed over it because she left the door unlocked to do so. What if a neighbor heard her? Anyone could walk on in. That was fucking  _dangerous._

He is kind of struck that he doesn’t give a shit that she went right back to it; her airy laughter radiating through the apartment, the occasional spank/moan filtering through to the living room. 

He smirks at her coy little sign off, toying with her knee brace he retrieves from the fridge before sitting on her couch. He doesn’t go in to fix things, pick up the iPad, moderate comments, fix lights. She’s doing this on her own. She's a fucking  _boss._

“Hey,” her smile is genuine as she crosses over to him in lingerie. Maybe it’s the way he always sees her, somewhat of a natural form, but it’s teal and yellow and she looks like a day at the beach in this bra and panty set. Maybe it will never be as sexy as it is  _normal_  now, but he can appreciate that she’s gorgeous.

She chews her lower lip with a shy smile.

“Come here.”

He slowly pulls her by the arm onto the couch. He only whispers, because he doesn’t want to talk, and the tone is enough to let her know that. She complies, flopping back into the couch. 

Maybe he should have gone home and showered first,  _he feels so fucking much,_  but it was automatic coming here instead. 

“I know I was supposed to make you feel  _less shy,”_  he strokes up and down her legs. They’re so soft. The idea of what he’s coming home to is killing him right now, he feels like porcelain, that having to shift forms into someone sexier and more in control would destroy him.

“That’s impossible, right now.”

She looks like she wants to cry for a minute. She looks as wrecked as he feels. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He groans when she kisses his lush mouth. 

"We can play another time,” she shakes her head. “I know. Come here.”

He puts her knee brace on her first, noticing she was favoring her good leg. She briefly feels like Cinderella when he crouches at her feet to do so.

He stays at her feet. She accepts the bulk of his shoulders between her knees.

"We've done this before," she tries to assure him, but he shakes his head and there's a flicker of rage in the intensity of his eyes. 

"No we haven't."

Rey nods.

She kisses his brow, runs her fingers through his hair, and sits back when he guides her hips. The panties come off. She spreads her legs, anything but the coy, shy tease over the phone with him, or the sporty, bubbly girl who just reached for the power button of her camera. She’s just the girl he needed to come home to. She’s Rey. Gentle, tough, open. 

He rubs his thumb up and down the arch of her foot, legs thrown over his shoulders, before dipping down to gently lick her. That way she shivers first, then feels the pleasure. She’s a little swollen, she must have taken herself on the floor of the camroom earlier tonight. So he goes for soothing. Wetting his mouth to wet her. He nibbles the lips of her labia, switching off and the swiping his tongue just inside her entrance. 

He loves listening to her sing with pleasure, her legs tightening around his head like she’s trying to climb him, her hands in his hair, her hips riding his touches. Rey allows her adoration to be physical, even when receiving. He pulls her closer, hungrier, arms banding around her hips and holding her steady. That makes her voice crack in a higher pitch, clinging to him. Instead of stilling her, it makes her fight. He closes his lips around her clit and sucks, her back arching and shoulders swaying in all the ways she can’t move with this. Her ankles cross at the back of his neck, her hands pulling his hair and it feels so good for him, better than sex, or maybe just the best sex he’s ever had. The lines were so much fuzzier since he decided to love her. 

He needed this. Needed to taste her, to love on her cunt a little, to keep hearing her whisper 'God, _yes,_ Ben' as her legs tensed around his head.

She’s naked save for her bra, he’s still got his leather jacket on, and her bare thighs have a beautiful friction with the material. 

He was trying all day to stage this in his mind. Maybe cuffs. Maybe a few spankings. But this is more intense than what he could have done with that control.

_He has no fucking control._  

Rey comes quickly, because this isn’t about him having power, it’s about surrendering his power, and she pulls him up to kiss his face and his wet lips as gently as she possibly can. Her thumb strokes over his cheek.

_“Hey.”_

Her brow quirks at the exhaustion in his voice. “How was the shoot?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he tosses his keys and wallet behind him onto the coffee table. They were slipping out of his pockets, which is why he did it, but it seems confrontational. “Not with you.”

Ben can’t look up from his hands. Rey sighs, obviously the mood is a little damaged.

_“Okay.”_

She puts a hand on his knee, motioning him up.

He doesn’t want today to be bad. He doesn’t want to be frustrated and tired and kind of a dick. But it’s what this is and it’s honesty and the more weight he presses on the ground beneath him the more steps forward he takes. Rey leads him to her bed. He doesn’t know what to expect.

“Jacket off.”

He hands it to her, catching her sniff the collar for some of that ancient smoke. 

“Hmm, jeans too,” she’s pulling up sweatpants over her bottomless lingerie ensemble. 

He obeys, his hands more than a little trembling.

“Lie on your stomach.”

It’s his turn to cautiously say  _“Okay.”_

She straddles his hips when his face settles on her pillows. She slides her hands under the hemline of his shirt. They’re flat and splayed and warm, and they move across his back in wide circles. He sighs.

“Rey, I-”

“Shh, you just got back. You don’t have to talk about it yet,” her brow rests between his shoulder blades. Her thighs squeeze his hips between them. Usually becoming Ben meant going home, showering, boxing for about an hour and eating a bloody steak. He didn’t do that today. Maybe he should have. 

But Rey’s touch is gentle. Comforting. 

“I love how big you are, and yet when I touch you, you just melt.”

There’s a lighthearted laugh near his ear as she says it. Her fingers dig into the muscles of his shoulders. He groans; they’re tight, but fixing that is going to hurt. 

"I thought it was the jacket, but you really smell like cigarettes."

He traces the print of her sheets; botanical drawings of flowers with loopy script scientific labeling them. 

"Phasma wanted to have a smoke and chew my ass about how I was ruining the shoot."

Rey's hands still. Shit. She should have known that statement was going to be a time bomb for him and his career.

"You don't have to talk about it yet, I just want you to relax. Feel better first."

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because,” and there’s a pause like she’s fine with that explanation. “You just came home. You had a rough day. And I care about you.”

At those bars, Rey learned about people. The smell of cigarettes twirls through her memory. A sucken-looking trucker complaining about having to go home to his wife after six weeks of uninterrupted hauling. 

_“Don’t you miss her?”  
_

_“She won’t give me five minutes to put my stuff down and open a beer before she’s on me, talking my ear off.”  
_

Rey lived solely off of free bar peanuts and the occasional comped order of mozzarella sticks from a nice waitress for three entire summers of her childhood, so whenever she pictured herself with her leg swinging from that barstool, she pictured herself eating peanuts whether she was at the time or not. That’s how monotonous memory worked for her. She tastes salt when she thinks about it, smells smoke. Feels nothing.

_“She misses you, probably.”  
_

_“Yeah, but I’m tired. I want to feel at home for five minutes before I have to think, before I have to listen. I just want her to wait until I’m ready to talk.”_

Rey understood it; those times she got back from a twelve hour waitressing shift and her parents were at the door about a gas bill or some other fake reason to take her tips out of her pocket and spend it on their habit-of-the-week. She didn’t cry later on about the indignity as much as she cried about not getting  _five fucking minutes_  to get out of “Public Rey” mode before someone was hounding her. Some people just needed time after a long day. 

_“What do you want her to do?”  
_

_“I don’t know,”_  the trucker got quiet, his head lowering so the bill of his hat covered his face.  _“My back hurts. Couldn’t picture her welcoming me home with a back rub anytime soon.”_

Rey didn’t know how to point out that maybe he never asked. That his wife also has needs. But she knew what to do in her shoes, when her partner came in looking ragged. Ben has already proven he could do that for her.

“I don’t think I deserve it.”

“You do,” he feels her lips on his shoulder. “You do to me.”

“Rey, I know we didn’t talk about it. Thank you for being understanding today, but what you said the other day, it made me fucking sick, and I-”

“I don’t view porn the way you do,” Rey kneads gently, her hips swaying as she leans forward, “I don’t view anything the way you do. That’s the whole point. That we are trying to be objective from our own experiences. That’s why I’m not doing it, and you are. My discomfort with it is something you respect. Hux tried to drag me back on that set for  _months,_  you never once tried to get me to shoot boy/girl again, even though I know he tried to get you to talk to me about it.”

“You…knew about that?”

_He’d kill that fucker._

She nods, lifting his shirt up to touch the knots under his bare skin. 

“There was an email you left open on your iPad, about him incentivizing you to cross-promote Star Destroyer through my show. And to try to make me ‘see reason’ about it. It was when I was looking for the email receipt for a new light you’d ordered for me to pay you back.”

_“I’m so fucking sorry.”_

“Don’t be. I saw you told him _no._ ”

In very, very colorful language. A smile pulls at her lips, even as he tenses up like a corpse underneath her. 

_“Rey-”_

“Shh, baby. You never tried to pressure me to make me do something that made me uncomfortable. If  _you’re_  comfortable with it, I can’t make you stop doing it. It’s your body.”

_“Do you want me to quit?”_

They both freeze. There’s a tense silence. His tone is annoyed, accusatory, he snapped at her, really, basically ignored all the comfort she was trying to give and the point of what she was saying. She slides her hand under his on her pillow.

“That’s not my call to make, Ben.”

“If I’m going to be your boyfriend,” this is already reaching by  _a lot,_  “I have to know if it’s going to bother you.”

Rey is quiet. But her hands never stop being gentle. She lays herself over him, her chest along his spine, her face nestled in his hair.

“Ben, sweetheart, I don’t want you to quit for me. If I loved a porn star who was happy doing it and we take the proper precautions, I’ll fucking  _marry_  them if the time ever comes and they can shoot seven days a week if they want. But if you want to quit  _for you_ , I also can’t make that choice. Don’t make me pull you towards what you should decide like I’m standing on the right side. This is a nuanced issue. I don’t know if there is just one way. So we get the path that we get.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No. I knew who you were.”

There is no judgement in her voice. 

“But you do have a problem.”

“Alright,” she sighs again. “I respect your choice. I do. I just…I have a lot of anger towards Star Destroyer. That’s part of me I can’t ignore and I need you to understand. It’s a skeevy company that treated me badly. Is that enough for you to stop trying to make me  _make you_ quit? Am I allowed to express my issues with this without you thinking I’m controlling you?”

He never thought that, because she usually sounded _right._

He reaches behind him awkwardly. Somehow knows where to find her bad knee. Strokes it with an affection that has her heart bursting. 

“I think I know what I need to do.”

She snuggles closer, resting more of her weight on him. It feels so good to be squished against her mattress by her body over his body. Her bare stomach on his bare back. Just breathing.

“I’ll support you.”

“Well,” he shuts his eyes and groans into her pillows. She feels the rumble of it through her entire body, “I need to call my mother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize I'm shooting fish in a barrel by pointing out porn is sexist; so we're drifting away from that as Ben begins to drift away from Star Destroyer. Let's see the other side of the spectrum.
> 
> You all have been such wonderful readers and have been forgiving of my diving into darker content and mediating my space in a way that has made this a uniquely rewarding experience. Thank you. I take your comfort levels very seriously. No matter what, tell me to alter tags as needed. I will be more aware of tags in the future. Do not feel that you cannot ask or that I will ignore you; always ask. And if how I handled things broke your trust in me as a reader, I am deeply regretful. 
> 
> This was a very intense chapter. At least Leia is coming in to smack some sense into her son. This story tackles a lot of toxic masculinity and thank you to everyone who both doesn't want to burn me at the stake for implying Ben may have an issue with that here and also for giving him the chance to learn and grow.
> 
> Also, to anyone who is like “jfc shut up just when are you getting back to the kinky shit?” Next chapter, I swear to God this time! It is not fun spending more time on your chapter notes than you do on the story.


	12. we're the greatest, they'll hang us in the Louvre

It’s not that easy,  _it’s never that easy,_  that even when she wears him down he still has to do it on his own.

It’s the letting go that’s hardest. That he was holding out his hand and seemed to have pulled it into a fist and withdrawn it. That he falls asleep in her arms and never mentions calling his mother again.

He cooks her dinner at his place, a big steak with potatoes and broccolini. They eat it out on the patio she has never really gotten to enjoy during her favorite time of day, her eyes wide to the sunset against the mountains. She watches him cautiously as he watches her for a reaction. He seems to want to share everything he hadn’t before to make up for lost time. 

He favors their meetings be at his place. It might be a control thing. She accepts it. He wants her to watch movies that remind him of her. He pays for things, a lot. They toy with the idea of penetration, fingers filling her cunt experimentally, with a dangerous level of intimacy. Three hurt the first time, but it was rushed because she was feeling needy and was literally up against a wall and the angle was bad. She coaxed him to try it again. The next time was better. The third was hotter than hell. 

He eats her pussy with a frequency that has her balance altered all week, her legs never getting their rhythm back for being thrown over his shoulders and shaking at all times during the day and night. During breakfast, before he leaves for a shoot. Coming home. Casually watching a movie on his couch, he’ll suddenly get up and kneel at her feet. It’s common, like prayer, for him to rest his cheek on her thigh to catch his breath, and her fingers in his hair signal of a baptism, or an absolution. 

But it’s not that easy. It is never that easy. 

Depending on Rey to absolve him for the entire human race, or as a representative of the entire female population, is not going to fix things. Mostly because he  _doesn’t_  owe humanity or the female population an apology,  _or anything,_  the only thing he owes anyone is honesty with himself. 

She tries not to bring it up. But it dances on her tongue, making her bounce on the balls of her feet during pauses in conversation. Chews her nails. Gives loaded looks.

During the feast he made her, he catches her.

At breakfast, he catches her.

When they climb into his bed at night, he catches her.

Ben returns these looks knowingly, a hand over her mouth in the form of his eyes on her. It has to be from him. He has to do this for himself.

And she chews her next bite, mouth full of the juice of rare meat that he cooked for her, and says nothing.

And she kisses him goodbye, and tells him to cum thinking of her at work that day, and says nothing.

And she cuddles up against him, and falls asleep feeling so safe, and says nothing.

Rey breaks about a week later. A week of two shoots for him  _-fluffing duties by her are fulfilled when asked but he asks with less frequency, he seems to be back in the usual mentality-_ and her show also returning to business as usual. They even dare to intersect slightly with her next show being  _for_  him in the room. Unbeknownst to those tipping her, tokens dinging, he strokes himself behind the camera as she strips, moans, slides a toy inside her and arches her back. He is merely a shadow in the corner, a voyeur that she wants, not requires. It feels better when he’s there, it’s familiar instead of new. But he’s not there in his glasses with his hair tied back, fixing lights like her good little production manager. He is part of the sexual experience. She plays  _to_  him, like she never did a specific viewer, and the  _rawness_  proves good for profit. They just think she’s really hungry for the cock inside her tonight. The suction cup at the base of the dildo stuck flat to the floor, her hips moving up and down it frantically.

She gets off on the lie. Ben is the sadistic secret she keeps from those paying her, an empowerment fantasy of deception, a story taking place in her own mind that no one else can have.

_Her husband coming home from work and wanting to show off his pretty wife to hundreds of strangers, making her first work for it to be rewarded with his cock._

_A filmmaker revealing his muse to a rapt audience in explicit detail, a panel of critics examining every expression for what it could mean, even though she knows it’s that she’s his._

_A caught little camgirl by a sexy, nosy neighbor, who is polite enough to wait until she’s done to tell her how bad she’s being, watching her take thick inch by thick inch of her toy to ready her for his cock._

But when she looks over at him, toes curling as her cunt clenches down on a massive dildo: it’s Ben. It’s Ben, it’s Ben, it’s Ben. And he’s not playing. He’s watching her, his cock in his fist, he looks ready to snap his jaws shut on her.

She howls, back arching, “I can’t, I can’t, I ca-”

 _You can,_  he mouths from across the room, fist making fast work of his cock, and she fucking  _loses_  it. He's being so quiet and good for her. 

Despite her disbelief it could happen this fast, this hard, she cums again.

And she gave him  _her_  rules; no touching, no speaking, he could stroke himself and he could watch and that was what he did.

It’s liberating. It never felt liberating before. 

Her cunt is so soft when the show is over, primed and ready. He takes her to the couch, stripping his body to lay beside her, and they rut against each other, fucking hands and grinding between thighs.

“You  _tortured_  me,” he whines, but he likes it, his tone a little mean to say he’d like to torture her too. There’s teeth in the words, and maybe a little blood from bitten tongues. “You tortured me, baby. You know what I'm going to do to you for teasing me like that?"

She drags her hips over his, half-lidded eyes on his face. “Uh-huh,” she’s in a haze of sex, feeling out the softness of her body with his hardness. He senses the insistent nudge. She’s testing, the tip of him snugly notched inside her, but she’s far gone in her own world after so many orgasms and he wants her  _present_  when she takes him to hilt.

“S-stop,” his hands are shaking when he slips free from the core of her. She pulls back, concerned. The bravado is gone. He looks how she feels. She always feels this overwhelmed. It's like she's taken five steps passed him and realized he's not leading anymore.

So she takes those steps back to him.

"What?"

“I”m not ready,” he croaks out, and it’s so gentle and shy that her heart breaks. “Not like this.”

She gets it. This is the money-rush; the impossible heist of getting strangers to pay her to take her clothes off when so much of porn is free, and so many other women are out there. The adrenaline high on a mountain of loot. She imagines bank robbers feel this way: Bonnie and Clyde fucking in their getaway car. 

It's a cheap feeling, when it wanes and the _work_ of it all comes back. That this is a legitimate business. It is not the time to take him inside her, try to soothe the ache that's been growing in him at the idea of hurting her, it's too much to feel at once when she's not quite the girl on the screen, but not quite Rey yet. Someday, they will fuck like rabbits like this. But she knows what he feels. 

She lies them down, side by side, and slides his thigh between her legs. His fingers find her, gasps at how much she feels like home.  _He may be the world’s biggest idiot-_

“You don’t have to be ready,” she cups his chin. “You don’t have to be anything at all. It’s okay.”

And it is. It is when they just touch each other with their hands, dipping heads to kiss shoulders and chests and necks when they have enough in their heads to think to do so.

His cum is pooling on her belly, dripping off her breasts, tickling her neck. She doesn’t know exactly when the flood of warmth came but he feels so good on her skin. She smears it across the freckles on the tight skin of her belly, licking her fingers to savor his taste. He watches her touch herself with him dripping all over her fingers. He wouldn’t know how to explain to anyone what they were doing, but she was right. This is sex.

“You were so good,” she tells him, kissing his chest, his freckles, his nipples. Her tongue dances across his skin, the hands holding her are shaking and bone white. 

At some point the tension of adrenaline snaps, the intensity of how wound up she is dies, and she’s laughing into his neck and he’s kissing her hair and it’s not so life-and-death.

“You were beautiful,” he nuzzles under her jaw, and the efforts he made to be good for her were what made her cum so hard on camera. After the incident with “Kylo” it was like he needed to prove he was okay with it. Not her using  _him,_  that was something… _maybe someday,_  but it seemed cruel to do it with a model of his cock before she had sex with the real him.

But he needed to prove this was her job, and he was fine with it, as she was fine with him.

"So were you."

A much-needed shower leads to whining, because her legs are tired but he knows she had  _so much worse_  under his watch.

He tells her as much, his smile curling in a crooked way. “I’ve seen you get it so much harder, baby. You can stand up.”

“Asshole,” she mutters. 

She gets the lightest spank for mouthing off about him  _almost_  getting soap in her eyes, his hands on her careful as always when he bends down to wash her hair. He’d never: it’s a toothless accusation. The slap erupts smalls bubbles from the soap in his hands. Her wet skin makes it feel sharper, but it was barely at a three. She laughs, turning to wrap her arms around his neck, her soapy body pressed to his.

And it’s there that she breaks:

“When were you going to call your mother?”

And he blinks at her. A hand curls at the back of her skull, another quickly presses her into the wall. It doesn’t hurt, but it does startle her a little bit.

It was a mistake to believe he wasn’t thinking about it. One look from him and she knew he was thinking about his next course of action every damn day. 

 _“I need to do this on my own,”_  his voice is flat and passionless. She had sprung some part of this trap, without meaning to. She nods, pinned. The only sound is the water for a few moments. 

His eyes soften. They both breathe a sigh of relief. And it’s not four minutes, but they look at each other long enough to hear and be heard through their eyes.

Rey nods. “Then I won’t ask again.”

Her threat laces steadily into the words, even with him pinning her, but they drop their swords and kiss and make up before the hot water runs out.

…

He nearly kicks over an empty cardboard box in the thresh hold of Rey’s apartment upon his return from a weekend in Las Vegas. He may be the only person in the world who goes there for strictly business.

The box was right underfoot, torn open, packing materials strewn everywhere.

Vegas was a nightmare, but to leave was to go home to something better, so he doesn’t know how to feel. Three shoots over the course of a weekend isn’t his craziest out-of-town schedule. However, Hux had snuck in a meet-and-greet at some adult convention, his only contractually obligated one a year, and after three shoots that went fine, he was running on empty while he had to pose for photographs with fans who thought  _porn star_  meant an excuse to tell him about  _everything._  Trying anal sex the first time, making their husbands pull hair like the way  _he_  did, how often they used “Kylo.”

His mother had fans who were the same way, posters from her film career pressed under her nose with a sticky pen, but she laughed it off. He could act automatically in these things, like it was a scene, he was just this person to be projected on for fantasies and the personal slid off like he had a layer of slick over him.

Mila had once joked her second job should be a therapist, with everything her fans told her. And they told her  _everything._

There was one night Rey was camming, literally fucking herself hard on camera, and she paused and looked at the screen and quietly said “I’m sorry about your wife,” to some distressed commenter. Ben stopped what he was doing and looked at the chat. The guy was messed up, obviously grieving, said she was the first girl he’d seen naked since she had died. Ben had found it brave that she let a moment that could have gotten her more money pass just to let someone be sad who needed to be. Memories of Rey made him love her just as much as spending time with her did; a tree that’s roots extended as deep as the branches did high.

It was a personal profession. One the women in his industry, even being exposed to worse, handled better than he did.

Maybe it was the rawness of everything going on with Rey, with boundaries, with Star Destroyer. He didn’t want to ruin anyone’s fun, or be rude. But this was starting to make him uncomfortable, even if he never noticed before. 

Usually he tuned it out, maybe tried to find a sense of bravado from the compliments from  _fans he had,_  or at least motivation to do well at his job. 

But his mind was reeling from the conversation about boundaries, and the things he  _does_  and  _doesn’t_  want to do anymore. And his flight back to LA, his brain was flickering with shots. Movie shots. Shots of Rey. Making a movie  _with her._

He hasn’t seen his thoughts as shots on a screen in a long time. They are artsy and pretentious and the kind of sex-based-inspiration that film school critiques would have roasted him for. 

And yet, he couldn’t get back to the muse fast enough. 

After he sets the box on the floor aside, he sees the rest of the mess of her living room. Rey’s eyes flicker up to him, glass of wine in her hand, laptop in front of her on the floor. But she’s fully dressed, seemingly in business mode. It’s a night off. He’s relieved.

Rey had done a show the night before. His brain fogged when he thought about it.

_“You guys,” her voice was hushed, she didn’t hide a smile that he clearly recognized. “I want to do something naughty.”_

_She pulls up her shirt to expose the undersides of her breasts. She’s got glasses on, which is usually the marker for a character for her, to disclaim that it’s not Rey, or whoever littlemissnobody is: maybe she’ll pretend to be married or a teacher or being blackmailed into filming this or something. Most of her viewers knew this marker, and were rustling in the comments to figure out her angle this time._

_**Hot nerd.** _

_**HOT NERD.** _

_**Fucking sexy librarian, nice, spank yourself with a ruler.** _

_“My boyfriend is out of town.” her hands press her breasts up to accentuate the curves._

_And she’s talking to him, because of course he’s watching in his hotel room._

_“And I don’t want to wait anymore.”  
_

_**Ben: you shouldn’t have to wait, baby. Get started and he’ll catch up when he gets back.** _

_Rey’s breath wavered as she read the comment he just typed, her lids slipping low over her eyes. The internet could be a magical thing. Ben covered his mouth as he waited for her to respond. Not to be a bastard, he sent a hefty tip. He saw her smirk as the money went through. She was working, after all._

_“I guess I’ll just have to give you all a show instead,” she slips her top over her head, a rather conservative sweater, and strips off her black bra. “Please don’t tell my boyfriend. I don’t want him to know what I showed you….”  
_

_And her fingers slide into her pussy._

_“I love him so much, and I don’t want him to be mad at me when I’ve been such a bad girl.”  
_

_His hands shake as he types. He almost wants to call her out for taking him out of the scene._

_**Ben: I bet he loves you too. Now I want to watch you fuck yourself enough to make him jealous of what he’s missing. He'll go crazy when he gets home.** _

Now Rey is tying her hair in a knot atop her head, her tank top and jeans and bare feet. She’s crouched on the floor reading instructions manuals like she’s assembling Ikea furniture, not the giant sex saddle placed in the middle of the room.

He almost forgot about the sybian.

“Welcome home,” she drawls, popping up from her squat to give him a kiss. 

“Don’t tell me you were trying to use the sybian while I was gone but this is as far as you got-” he gestures to the disassembled thing. She laughs. 

“No, I was waiting for you to get back,” she grins.  _“I’ve been doing research._  I think it’s time you directed another one of my streams.”

“Research, hot,” he kisses her forehead. His lips dip to her ear. “loved the show, last night, by the way.”

Rey radiates light when she smiles. Ben looks down at his hands. Losing his nerve.

“Loved it,” he repeats, his tongue dry. “Loved the character.”

There’s no third try. She nods, accepting the surrender gracefully, and squints at the instruction manual in her hands.

“Do you need-”

“Nope,” she crouches back down and hit a button on the controls. The saddle hums to life. She smirks and places one of the rubber inserts over the seat. This one has just the slightest extension that would fit inside her when she straddled it, the size of his thumb, the right length to hit her g-spot.

He had researched this very intensely, so it’s intriguing to watch her play with it instead of him handling it.

She tests the seat with the flat of her hand, grinning. She seems to appreciate the purchase in person instead of him trying to explain it to her. 

“So my research-”

She glances up, and swallows down the lump that rises in her throat, because  _Kylo is fucking back._  Kylo looks like he wants to chain her to that toy for three days and watch her fall apart.

She switches off the sybian and makes room for him on the floor. 

He slides his bag out of the doorway, out of his way, and lifts her laptop to put on the coffee table.  

“My research,” she reaches for the computer, which he hands to her. “I was looking for alternative genres of porn. I found this series. I can’t stop-”

She shows him her screen, a black and white shot of a woman at a table with a book in her hands, shot so the viewer feels like they’re sitting across from her. they hold the laptop between them. She presses play. The woman reads, but her breath is labored. After a few words, her fist flattens on the table, fingers stretched out, and she twitches while stumbling over a phrase.

“Are they-?”

“I don’t know what toy it is, but yeah. Probably a Hitachi? They just read the passage from a book and someone else controls their orgasms and no one is naked and it’s really…”

“It’s like an experiment. The control is they have to read the text. And the reactions are real,” His hand grips her knee. “You are a fucking  _devil_  for finding this.”

She nods, her eyes on the screen a little too into something that is just business research. He touches her hair, searching.

“What is it, baby?”

“I-” she bites her lip and looks away. “I think I found porn I actually really like.”

“This?”

She nods again, resting her chin on his shoulder. What they’re watching is physical and mental and very pretentious -he’d never peg her for such pretentious taste in porn- but it was a new way of looking at it that was obviously getting her  _very_  turned on. 

He kisses her temple, her cheek, under her jaw. And he’s not distracted from this headspace. He’s  _proud_  of her. She brought him something good; like a master who actually  _loves_  it when the cat brings him back a dead mouse. The loyalty of the gesture is there. And he can totally work with this.

She laughs sweetly, her head coming onto his shoulder. “I mean, obviously, it’s a basic format, but since we can  _go there_  I’ll be naked and we can get more explicit. Get me on the sybian and I’ll read something while you play with the controls and we can fill a show with that.”

“What about…” he’s not quite Ben right now. He’s a mix. He’s still looking right at her, but he’s holding back his words without them making his whole posture shut down. She raises her eyebrows.

“Tell me.”

“We film the dress rehearsal  _for us.”_

Rey’s head falls back with a throaty laugh. 

“This never, ever goes online.”

His eyes go dark. Privacy may be his new…thing. Between them, instead of just alone. 

“I promise.”

She makes a sympathetic face and gently touches his cheek.

“You just want something for you?”

He nods. “We can watch it together. I’ll upload and edit it, if it ever gets edited, on your home computer. Memory card never leaves this apartment.”

She cranes her head back to look at him. “Try a little harder to convince me.  _The sexy way._  Business never gets me in the mood.”

He laughs, tucking his mouth against her neck. “I want this moment saved. How I feel with you. I want to see you cum, I want to hear the modulations of your voice when you try to say anything other than how much you want this. I want you to struggle for words for me. I want you to cum so many times you have to beg me to stop. I want to watch it with again and again to remind you this is how we felt. Please baby, be good.”

“I want to be good,” there’s a flutter in her chest. She looks like she’s trying to bite her tongue, but his finger hooks in the strap of her top to pull her close for a kiss. It removes the hesitation. “I’ll be good…Daddy.”

And Ben  _drags_  her into his lap with a pained groan. She writhes in his arms when his fingers dig into the knot of her hair, holding her in place as he fucks his tongue into her mouth. Even the way she said it was cute. Like it wasn't this iron-clad promise of a lifestyle. It was just..playful. Hushed. Whispery. Sweet.

“You can’t use that every time,” his voice grits out. “But… _fuck_.  _Rey.”_

She laughs into his shoulder as he manipulates her over his hardness. Her mouth falls open when she feels the affect she just had. “Oh.  _This_  does it for you?”

He neither nods nor shakes his head as she combs his hair out of his face, securing it back with a tie he offers from his wrist. 

 _“You_  do it for me. Just… _say that…_ on special occasions.” 

Rey is laughing so hard she’s shaking, a mess of pent-up arousal and humor and love and he gets to hold her in his arms; a universe contained. 

“I almost didn’t.”

“Saw you bite that back,” he’s genuinely grinning, ear-to-ear, as he helps her up to slide her jeans and underwear off. She ties her tank top around her waist to be out of the way. “But you couldn’t help it, dirty girl.”

She sits back on the sybian, hissing as she comes into contact with the rubber. Maybe not wet enough…

His fingers slide through her folds before she drops her weight. She smiles, writhing a little bit and much more enthusiastically towards his touch. 

“There’s lube in the drawer.”

It was probably placed there for a shoot. Doesn’t matter. One less room to travel. 

He fumbles behind him for the bottle and brings a palmful against her, coaxing it inside her with his fingers. She sighs, gripping his arms for balance, before lowering her now-slick self onto the toy. She switches it on and lets out a low whistle. 

 _“Shit,"_  her face scrunches up, "I need something to read-”

He groans, annoyed. “If this is for you and me, we can try different things. Let's see how you feel on the sybian first.”

She nods, shaky. “There’s a Canon L840 in my camroom.”

He’s off like a shot, and she laughs as her hips rest down on the vibrating seat. Then loses her breath. It’s intense, the kind of intense that is all of the sex they were having before this was…a romantic partnership. They’ve been the slow kind of intense for a while. Not as ramped up for it as they are now. It’s been so gentle the past few weeks she begins to feel pulled by a riptide, back out into open sea. It can be both. It can be anything it needs to be.

Something nudges her ribcage. She opens her eyes, looks down. Instructional manual.

“You can read that,” he’s not even looking at her, adjusting the lens. “If you want.”

And the biggest problem becomes  _not laughing,_  even through arousal, trying not to burst out how she loves how  _happy_  he looks. His fingers are flying over buttons of the camera to adjust the settings to his liking. They’ve only filmed with a webcam before, this is fascinating to watch for a lot of reasons.

“Pass,” she tosses the booklet aside. “Until we find something better. This is just you and me, right?”

He nods. “I’d rather hear you talk. Hands in front, don’t move them.”

Obediently, her hands come up to the front of the sybian, bracing herself on her palms to try and buck a little against the constant stimulation. For the first time he seems to note the affect it’s having on her. She’s squirming, watching him for his approval. His cock is dying under the denim of his jeans, but he controls the urge to touch her. 

“Like it?”

She nods, and he reaches over to up the vibration on the remote. She keens, her hips riding the saddle wildly. There’s that devilish smirk on his face as she rescinds control to him, but he crouches back with the camera trained on her. Watches just her hips moving. The cranes up before he hits record.

The first shot, because he’s already planning more, is of her from the neck up, from where he crouches at her side. Her blissed-out face in profile. He leans back to get her shoulders hunching over as she bears down on the source of her pleasure. This is kind of fun. Getting angles he can’t see from positions where he’d be the one fucking her. So he can watch them whenever he wants. It’s an investigation, an examination. 

“You look beautiful.”

She whimpers, her arms shaking in front of her. 

“Could watch this for hours,” he murmurs, and she glances at him, her eyes tearing up. Her face is sweaty and flushed already.

 _“This feels really good.”_ She’s whispering like she has to. 

He smoothes his free hand down her belly. “I hear it’s life-changing.”

His thumb finds the seam of her pelvis and thigh, the tuck of skin in the angle between. It digs in, she flinches, her back arching. 

“What’s better, me or the machine?”

_His arrogant, obnoxious tone._

She shoots him an exasperated look, framed a little shakily but caught on his camera, along with the rumble of his laugh. 

“It’s different.”

“How so?”

She sighs, her hips bouncing on the black, half-barrel-shaped seat. “I feel this…kind of everywhere. Instead of you hitting one spot, this is making everything work. But I like you at one spot, or two. I like you focusing on me. It’s different.”

He kisses her shoulder, dipping the camera between her arms for a shot of her flexing thighs. “You’re awfully articulate. Too articulate, for a girl on a sybian. Let’s turn it up.”

And she whimpers, but takes what he gives so well. Always does. 

He keeps focusing on reactions. Hux would have fired him in an instant with all this disembodied focal points; thighs chording, back arching, hands gripping with white knuckles as she’s cumming in front of him. No tits, no ass, no pussy. Just intimate little shots, the motions of pleasure. The things  _he_  cares about, as the only viewer of this movie. 

Rey’s a little ragged from the constant stimulation and attention, so when she loosens up after the _…third? fourth?_  orgasm he pulls back to her face. 

“You okay?”

It’s just her shoulders up to the top of her head, a tight shot of her reactions. He gets to document her lids fluttering, her lips forming silent pleas, the tension in her neck. 

She shoves him back by the shoulder and grabs the camera. _"Watch me."_

 He sits back, stunned, and she turns the lens on him. She catches his dumbfounded expression, the shift into lust and possession as she is both the one being pleasured and the one who wants to watch. His reaction becomes the thing that matters. This is what _she_ would document. His baited breath and the hunger in his eyes.

She films him for the entirety of her orgasm. It may be the only filmed image of himself he likes. 

He rubs a hand over his mouth, letting his eyes move over her. Letting his honesty get the better of him. Her hands are shaking, she's not even really looking at the viewfinder, but it works somehow.

"You like watching?"

"Fuck yes." He has to clear his throat. "You know I do."

Her back arches again, and she surrenders the camera back into his own shaking hands. Her hands go back to the front of the machine, like he ordered.

"Do you like it?"

“I love it,” she drawls, with no self-consciousness. Her flushed cheeks are the only indication that she is being fucked out of her mind while her boyfriend watches and films. She looks right in the camera. “I love it,  _Daddy.”_

It’s meant to be defiant. It’s the flash in her eyes that gives it away. To give as good as she gets. Her attempt to get under his skin, even as the person he’s filming. Her way of saying: _“Fuck being an object, I’m here to play too.”_

And he’s really met his match, and there’s no going back.

“I love you, Rey.”

It’s so automatic that he watches her reaction in the viewfinder before he sees her face. The heavy breath she takes, her eyes on the floor, before looking right at him. He grabs her hand with his free one, and her fingers are white around his as she cries out, her body seizing like some kind of possession. She cums harder than he’s ever seen. He stops filming when the screaming stops, turns off the camera once her body slackens, putting it safely out of the way enough to drag her off the saddle and into his arms. 

“If you wanted to try, this is about as prepared as I can be,” she informs him, and he lunges for the table in front of them for where he left the bottle of lube. He coats his hand with it.

“If you can take three fingers, I’ll try.”

She nods, lifting herself on her knees. Her hand shakes as she switches off the vibration. With a grunt, he shoves the sybian through her legs behind her, out of the way, and dips two inside of her. No resistance, in fact, her thighs try to close around his hand, her inner muscles working to keep them inside. There’s a little exhalation when he tries a third, stroking the soft inside part that always gets her melty and sweet for him. Her eyes close, her hips bearing down on his fingers. 

“I did it,” she smirks at him.  _“You said.”_

He had wanted something romantic to signify the first time he pushed inside her. Some prepared speech about being ready. There is no  _ready_  for the momentum of his feelings. Almost ten years doing porn did not make him ready. Having sex with her all those months ago did not make him ready. 

He finds his home inside of Rey’s lax, begging body on the floor of the apartment he’d spent half the nights of this year in, her eyes on his. There wasn’t really anything to be said, and it was happening before he really knew to be scared, to worry, to panic over hurting her. It was just the moment.

It’s tight, but she’s wet as a lake and he coated himself in lubricant and the muscles inside her are opened up from the constant waves of pleasure. When she feels him inside her eyes roll back and she laughs with  _relief_  of all things. 

Rey trembles all over when the warmth of him filled her up. But it doesn’t break her. It didn’t hurt her. He had let fear keep this away from him, this warmth, this light. 

“You didn’t break me,” she kisses his chest, her face flushed and her hair spilling out of its bun. Her legs wrap tight around his waist. “Baby, see? You were never going to hurt me. We just had to be prepared.”

 _“Fuck,”_  is all he can say, his arms trembling as she touches him. His face shoves into the crook of her neck. Porn star stamina…is very far from his current skill set. 

“It had to be like this,” she clings to his shoulders as he thrusts. He’s so distracted by how good it is he seems to wake up realizing that it’s  _happening_ and he didn’t even think to ask if he was splitting her apart, because he obviously wasn’t. “You had to be ready.  _I’m ready._  Now fuck me like you always wanted to.”

With a growl, he holds her wrists down on the floor, pinned. 

“Does that mean you belong to me?”

Her back arches, her eyes challenging. “Do you know how long I’ve belonged to you, and you  _only just now_  ask?

And the controlled, comforting tone to her voice cracks away when he holds her down and _ruins himself_ at her feet. This moment is theirs.

It makes him ready to do the things he's been thinking about every second since she told him how she felt about Star Destroyer. He couldn’t do  _anything_  about this whole existential dilemma until he had a plan. Now he has the plan.

…

His mother’s office hours should not have been accessible online, but he’s at Room 2 Door 2 at eleven on Friday with two black coffees because of that fact. Privacy is underrated. 

She's grading papers. Blue lines cover most of the surface of one page, pen making angry swipes. Leia takes one look at him, accepts the coffee, and waits for him to speak first. He knows better; she’ll get her words in later. 

“Do you think that I hate women?”

Leia snorts, taking a sip of her coffee. “You think that I think that  _every man_ hates women.”

“I’m serious.”

She rolls her eyes, not knowing where this is going. That was always a situation that did not show his mother in the best light. “Okay. I’ll bite. I think you have a resentment towards strong women, and also a fascination with them, which is why you could both pursue and undermine relationships with them. You’d pick out feisty girls and then run when they’d show any interest back because you wanted control of an idea. Their agency intimidated you. I think you work in a medium where women have a defined place and that makes you feel secure. But _hating_ them? No. I didn’t raise you to hate women. Mother figures, sure, that may be another thing I messed up,” and she shrugs. She's accepted that he can't stand her, and she failed. It kind of hurts. He did a lot to put her in that place. “So I assume a woman brings you here today. I hope you know that changing this about you isn't _her_ job.”

He nods. “I'm working on it. I love her.”

Leia glances at the ceiling. “God help us all.”

“But that’s not why I’m here, really.”

Leia takes a deep breath. He tries not to feel defensive. But his mother seems so cautious around him, maybe, because he hasn’t cared about hurting her for a long time, and she assumes he’s here to do it today. 

“Do you think feminist porn exists?”

She blinks a few times, wrapping herself tighter in her asymmetrical cardigan. “Thank you for bringing me coffee before this discussion. Let's get really gritty here, I know you'll love this; What the hell do _you_ mean by 'feminist' porn?"

Of course it wasn't that easy. He sighs. "I may be learning that the stuff I was doing...hurt the person I love a lot. And it can be degrading. Even I know that. So I wanted to know if there can be something made today, through possible means, that is not exploitative, or bad, or if it's just part of it and I can't change that..."

He plugs his mouth shut with his coffee. Leia takes a moment to think.

"Erotic content for women exists, yes. If you are asking me for a solely unproblematic text, porn or otherwise, well, not a single one exists, I’m afraid. We have to find moments of framing and examine them. We’ve inherited a flawed world and are just picking through rubble for meaning. Building it from the ground up.”

_Suddenly things **could** be problematic?_

She reads his glare like she knows it's coming;

"Take that movie I was in. I was twenty and freezing my ass off on some shoot and the director tells me I'll be a gold bikini. That's something that will last forever in some film archive. But on that set, I told him if I had to wear that fucking thing, I would be the one to kill the bad guy. _Wearing_ the bikini. What happened still happened, but I took something back from that moment and that is the thing that lasts. Gloria Steinem would still give me shit over the bikini, but I did what I could with the power I had at the time. I could have walked, allowed someone dumber to do what she was told. But instead, I tried to find a compromise. These discussions will always exist. You cannot isolate humans from polarizing experiences, from reactions, from their own perception of light and dark."

“But the Skywalker…works. They don’t deserve meaning?”

He knows why he’s been avoiding her. She has a way of making things that are bothering him make sense, and he resents it. Because she’s right, she’s been right, he has just been trying to make her feel how he feels instead of understanding. The same thing he accused her of doing. 

Leia narrows her eyes. But the grimace at the corner of her mouth is the only time he found pain on her face over the topic. Maybe because he's never looked. 

“Not for me to be the executor of. Just because he’s my father doesn’t mean I’m upholding a legacy that goes against my morals. What was produced by him went through a studio, it exists, people can find it if they want to. That’s history. I wasn’t going to  _produce more_  from the stuff in the locker, Ben. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t your uncle. Write some tell-all and earn money from the things he did…it made my skin crawl even thinking of it. I just wanted you to…there was a personal investment…” Leia closes her eyes. “I wanted you to be exposed to things that would keep you objective, before this became your identity.”

He takes a sip of his coffee. 

“He’s your dad.”

Leia shakes her head sadly. “He didn’t raise me. And _I_ raised you. That doesn’t exactly make you agree with me or beg me for my response notes on John Berger to preserve  _for history.”_

He doesn't know how to answer that. 

Leia’s hand closes over his. It’s the first time he and his mother have touched in years. “I’ve seen your grandfather’s movies. I know you’ve seen them. It was all military stuff, you know. Strength and valor. How it is honorable to fight. It was what he did instead of being a soldier, of actually killing. He made movies. That’s art, and how it can be dangerous and powerful. What you make will outlive what you do. But we don’t lie in bed at night with the things that will outlive us. We  _live_  with the things we do.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Your grandmother was an actress, and a resistance fighter. Smuggled supplies, carried secrets, did shows for GIs. Undermined Vader at every turn, even if they would still see each other in secret."

Ben leans back in his seat. “But he-”

Leia closes her eyes and nods. 

“But he loved her. And she loved him. People are confusing. Does his soft spot for a resistance fighter make him less of a monster? Does her love for a monster make her efforts in vain? It's not an issue of cancelling out. The edifice of his work will always be the thing that people will remember in history because it was destructive. What she did was more important because it was good, because it was _fighting with all the power she had._   _That fucking bikini_ will outlive me, but do you think I let that stop me from writing my next book about Dorothy Arzner? Do you want to be remembered, or to live well?”

He looks down at the rings on her fingers.  

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because in all those years trying to pry Vader secrets out of me, you never asked about her. Maybe the issue with you wasn’t  _hating,_ Ben, it was  _not_   _caring._ ”

“So how am I supposed to fix that?” 

He doesn’t mean to raise his voice. But everything in the office rattles. She rests her folded arms on the desk.

“Well, you care enough about this person to come to me for the first time in years to ask for advice about how to treat them. You understand something about yourself you want to change. To make up for your mistakes. You being willing to listen and try is the most important step of all. I hope you know I'm really proud of you for doing it.”

He drums his fingers on the armrest, eyes flickering out the window. 

“She’s not making me choose, I just feel like I have a choice to make now.”

“Ben, do you want to prove feminist porn exists? Make it. Make bad first attempts. Be prepared to fail at it. Be ready to have everyone tell you you’re doing it wrong. When you're a feminist, there's still always going to be someone telling you you're doing it wrong. Especially me. Listen to people anyway. Some readings of your work will be lazy, some will be valid. Use your power in the moment; instead of the past telling you, or some vague, oppressive fear of the future.  _Care about doing it._ ”

"You're talking about it like it's art."

Maybe he was never looking for the affection on his mother's face. But he sees it now. 

"Ben, you are the smartest person I know. I raised you to prove it. If anyone can bridge pornography and art, it's you. And you'll have me here to prepare you a required reading list."

"You never-" he shakes his head. His shoulders drop. "You never supported my choice."

And she just looks disappointed in herself. 

"I'm sorry. You never seemed happy when you gave up film, Ben. Maybe I'm getting you wrong. But did doing porn make you happy?"

He finally looks her in the eye. It had been too hard before. But she's just a person; not a symbol of his emasculation or a mouthpiece for bitchy feminist rhetoric or the face that reflects back all the things he could have done but didn't. All that came from his blame.

He shakes his head. He didn't think it was important, being happy. He never felt like he deserved it. He still doesn't entirely, with Rey. Even though he is.

"I'm...trying something. Rey sort of...it's complicated. She quit the industry itself, at least does it independently...it's really complicated," there's a lot he doesn't want to explain to his mother. "We've been researching alternative routes to take this idea. And ever since her...you were right, I wasn't happy. She showed me just how much. But I am now."

His mother's brow crunches up, and she nods. "That's all I can ask for."

Even he cracks a smile. “Is that your blessing?”

She holds up her hands. “It can be. But let it be noted you won’t be making anything even _close_ to being called feminist as long as you’re at Star Destroyer.”

He closes his eyes. “How do you know that-”

“It’s for everyone in the world to see. You’re Google-able.”

_“Mom.”_

She turns back to her laptop, keying in her password to check emails. This already felt more natural, he pulls out his phone to fall back into old habits of half-paying attention. He feels it. How much she loves him. 

“I just never liked you working for Snoke, you were so much better than all that-”

“Wait,” Ben sets down his coffee. He knew that name. Leia said it like a dirty word, but he’s heard it before. “Who? What?”

Leia rolls her eyes. “You don’t even know the  _chief financier_  of that awful company? He’s funneling all his profit from  _a lot of businesses practices I don’t approve of, and I don’t mean porn_  into Star Destroyer as his pet project while he tries to pretend he’s the next Hugh Hefner. As relieved as I am that you've never met the guy-”

“Mom,” his mouth is dry. Hux trying to get him to convince Rey to come back. No one citing the obvious conflict of interest in the company’s main star helping someone who quit to freelance their content. The mysterious generous tipper. The guy who sent Rey a mold of Kylo’s cock. With a _note_ -

**GoingForSnoke: Your instructions are in the note.**

She was barely at Star Destroyer for two weeks; Kylo hardly knew anything about the corporation above Hux after all these years. She couldn't have known. Snoke was the same guy who held the legal rights to the footage Rey wanted scoured off the face of the earth. And he was trying to bait her for more. 

He never thought he’d say this;

“Mom, I think you were right about Snoke.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know 90% of the readers of PiO are people seeking camgirl smut who bail after three chapters, but those who stick around for the ethics of pornography lectures and the droning on and on about the stuff I like to talk about have made the experience of writing it so rewarding for me and I can't thank you all enough for staying with me this far. I'll have to write out a complete list of thanks by the time this story is over (maybe one more chapter and an epilogue, I'm running out of The Louvre Lyrics), but to those who are here to play and engage and add to the conversation; I thank you from the bottom of my heart to let me run wild with this. This is not the story I set out to write, it's so much better, and it's because you guys let me write it.
> 
> I love you a whole lot,
> 
> M.
> 
> ps the porn Rey is watching is based on a series called Hysterical Literature and it's the hottest goddamn thing on the internet. I believe it's available on Youtube because it technically does not violate their terms of use.
> 
> pps please no one trash talk the Leia conversation I cried so hard while writing it. I'm not saying some human lives are worth more than others but if God told me how many people I had to kill so we could get Carrie Fisher back I'd double it so we could have two of her.


	13. drink up your movements, still i can't get enough

Luke watches her crunch M&Ms between her teeth in resigned silence. 

This silence has been continual for a few minutes, while she avoids elaborating on her answer. 

When the candy bowl is empty, he finally gives her a hint; 

“Not giving this SnokingForGo guy or whatever an answer yet. You don’t _know_ the reason why or you don’t want to _admit_ the reason?”

The reason there was a  _ Kylo _ dildo in her drawer she didn’t throw away.

The reason that she didn’t email back GoingForSnoke and tell him to stop sending her creepy messages. 

The reason she let him keep suggesting she do the thing that already almost ruined her relationship with Ben by reducing him to an object.

She closes her eyes and breathes deep. 

“I…”

Shakes her head. Tears bubble up over the lashes of her lower lids. Her throat has a knife in it.

Near-crying always gets Dr Skywalker talking, doing some heavy lifting. She doesn't force this on purpose, but she is relieved when he steps in.

"You're trying to be practical. You're in a relationship now. There's no practical about that."

“It was a lot of money. I didn’t immediately agree to it.  _ I still haven’t.” _

But every minute before the word “no” felt like she was completely losing control. Like Snoke already had her. She was so, so close to sending back the present with a firm  _ no; _ and then he contacted her again and doubled the offer. 

_ Prove to me you can take  _ **_Kylo_ ** _ on camera. _

"your boyfriend is not going to find practicality _admirable_ in this situation. He's still going to feel betrayed."

"Which is why I would _never,"_ she snaps at him, but it feels overly defensive.

“But contemplating it makes you think you already have, or have compromised your integrity to consider it.”

“It’s awful.”

“And unfair to Sven.”

Rey always tenses when Luke parrots the fake name back to her, so it takes her a second to nod. 

“I know it’s a horrible thing. And that when it comes down to it, I won’t be able to do it, even if I agree. Not to him. He’s too good to me. For me. But I can’t...cut that tie with GoingForSnoke. I can’t muster up the courage and tell him to stop contacting me and leave me alone. Even if it’s wrong. And it’s not because I actually want to film what he told me to, it’s because…”

“Money. You can say it. It’s an easy answer. It’s why you do  _ all of this.” _

“Yeah.”

She leans back in the chair. The sugar is making her jaw clench up.

“And you are not that kid that needs a couple thousand dollars more than anything anymore. You don’t need to be anything anyone else asks you to be. You escaped that life. Now it’s time to move forward and figure out who you are.”

It still feels  _ wrong. _

“But I still don’t feel like I can say no.”

“Is it about the boyfriend? Do you feel like he’d want you to say yes?”

Rey shakes her head, banding her arms over her chest. Holding herself.

“I don’t even know how to tell him. He wouldn't understand. I think it felt almost...convenient. Before we had penetrative sex, it was almost like...what if I just got taking his dick  _ out of the way  _ through fucking that _ thing. _ Then that mess would be over and we could move on.  _ Sorry,”  _

Even hard-to-phase Luke has to close his eyes and take an exasperated, deep breath at that one, and he’d heard a lot of stuff like that from her at this point. 

It is a lot of information, but she’s-

“This is why I’m paying you,” she reminds him.

He lets out a resigned sigh. 

“Please tell Dr. Kalonia to stop referring me to porn stars.”

Rey just picks up the baton and keeps going.

“But you know, prove I can handle it and that he didn’t have to worry? He was so paranoid about hurting me, I thought. I don’t know.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No, we ended up having sex without me having to. Test it. With. You know.”

The dildo GoingForSnoke sent her. Of her boyfriend’s dick. That he wanted her to fuck before she fucked her own boyfriend. Like fucking him for real wasn't the most euphoric experience she'd ever felt. Wether his cock was actually inside her or not.

And it was the kind of money that had her consider it. 

It was awful, considering Snoke's offer for more than a second.

"And now, Ben doesn't understand what it feels like to come from nothing and not be able to easily walk away from money. _It's so fucking hard_ for me to turn down that offer because if I got it at other points in my life-"

_ "All of which being illegal because those points were when you were underage-" _

She glares at him. "But you say _yes_ anyway. It would have been a luxury I could not afford then. And I'm supposed to be doing this so I'm in control. Then some creepy guy keeps dropping tips in my streams to let me know he's interested in throwing money he doesn't have to worry about at me. It's dirty money, sure, but I already take money to do other stuff. _Did_ take money for worse."

“Rey. I can’t pass judgement on the ‘sex for money’ part of this, even when there’s a camera involved, because there isn’t a time where this is handled without there being huge moral dilemmas on either side of the transaction. Regardless of your stance on it. But as your therapist, maybe blending your romantic life with your pornographic one has enabled some of your emotional growth to be, well, hastily shot and edited, if you get the joke.”

_ “Fuck you,”  _ she grumbles, but she knows when Luke is on a roll. She waits. 

“Try detaching these worlds for a little bit. Because there’s a lot of parts of you up in the air right now as you come into your own, and your ability to say the word  _ no _ is something you’re suddenly struggling with. You haven’t before. That's sort of the baseline for any human sexuality is knowing when to say and hear the word no.”

She shrugs, gritting her resentment between her teeth. 

“I had to make a lot of compromises in my life.”

As if this was something she's always been. Even she knew she was lying. Even at her most desperate, she was deeply principled. She knew there were easier ways out, even when she could have let Ben do whatever Hux told him to on that Star Destroyer set just for the _money._

_She said no then. Why wasn't she better now._

This conflict was something unlike anything she'd ever seen in herself. This wasn't her past. This was her trying to create her past into a crutch.

Luke’s large eyes force her to come to terms with her defensiveness, her desire to sprint out of this office. He knows she’s itching to run. That’s how she handles pain. 

“You are not betraying that kid who didn’t have anyone take care of her by turning down a couple thousand dollars on principle. Yes, it would have bought food that could have fed that kid. But that kid grew up. She survived without you magically time-warping back to take care of her. That’s all we can ask for sometimes. And  _ that kid _ is still  _ you; _ and you took care of yourself the best you could. You now have the right to say no. You have the moral obligation to say no and set that as the example for her. It’s the only thing you can do for yourself back then, now. You do not have to go back and compromise your principles so that kid you once were will never have to. It’s too late. She’s grown. There is no going back to where you came from with what you’re earning now. You earned it. Forgive yourself.”

_ “Fuck.” _

At this, she breaks. Like she was caught dragging a duffel bag filled with cash into the past, handing it off to a smaller, hungrier self, the very skeleton inside of her. Sneaking out of the present to try and right it all. And how stupid that dream was. Was that what she’d been doing all along? The easy money and the stuffing her face and the ironic approach to love that she was assembling into a  _ fixed _ person?

She had to let this idea of the past die. 

No one was coming back for that broken little girl in that empty, angry house. Not even herself. Coming to terms with that was finally ending the fantasy that someone would climb in and save her. She already had.

Rey draws her knees to her chest. Feeling small. Her chin rests there, teeth clacking as she tries to stop the tears.

“If I stop acting like her, I’ll just be another person who left her behind.”

“Rey,” Luke’s voice is calm, as she cries quietly in the overstuffed chair, “You’re just bringing her with you. Tell this guy you don’t want to. And then tell him to take his money and shove  _ Kyl _ o up his ass.”

...

Ben doesn’t go straight home. He doesn’t go to Rey’s. He doesn’t go to the feminist bookstore Leia had scribbled onto a scrap of paper for him to start his research, or the admissions office to see if UCLA will ever take him back, or to the gym or to work or anywhere he imagined himself going when this was over. 

He goes to _N/Taboo._

It’s almost like there’s too much to talk about or process, so he plays hooky from those impending conversations about Snoke and Star Destroyer. He wants, ironically because he’s had no shortage of these in the past few days, to just have a calm, rational conversation about the sex industry. 

The girl at the counter is still the same, wearing a romper, dreamy and dazed as she works on the computer at the front counter. Smiling, despite how seedy her surroundings are. 

Or as he remembers from Rey talking to her: smiling, despite losing a sister. 

“Rose,” he says when he arrives at the counter. It feels sour coming from his mouth. He hates retail from the first-name casualness of name tags. She perks up.

“Can I help you?”

Rey is a casual kind of upbeat. Comforting. Rose overwhelms him and makes him feel hopelessly uptight and stiff. Email was a better medium for this conversation. 

“You assisted me and my girlfriend in a sale about a week ago. Your customer service was perfectly competent. I have a few questions for you.”

Rose, perkily, tilted her head and chirped “I am honored but I don’t have threesomes with custo-”

_ “Not like that.” _

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath:

_ “Sex-positive pornography.” _

Rose looks more skeptical because now what he’s offering  _ hasn’t _ been offered to her before.

“Again, flattered. But no, I’m not looking to star-”

“The topic of discussion, Rose, not a sales pitch.”

“Ohhh,” Rose turns off the monitor of the computer and hops up on the counter. “Yeah, you’re not going to find it in here, unfortunately. They don't put that on DVDs, which is sexist, I guess. I have a few subscriptions to creators with digital downloads that I can recommend, actually, there’s this one woman who has a  _ TedTalk _ that’s really compelling-”

He interrupts again, unintentionally this time; “You think it exists?”

She grimaces. “It  _ is _ really hard to find anything with an Asian woman that doesn’t make me want to cry. But when I do, yeah, I enjoy porn.”

“From an audience standpoint,” he tries to find a way to ask her without insulting her that sometimes audiences are stupid and that’s not really what he’s getting at. “But the industry being so exploitative-”

Now Rose interrupts:

“Well, yeah.” she brushes a stray curl behind her ear. “The industry as we know it is a shit show. But it can’t be impossible to point a camera at two unexploited people and have them make something hot. Or at least, have the experience be only as bad as any other job. My shoulders are  _ fucked _ from the time I worked as a cashier in a grocery store, and that was just handing off plastic bags full of soup cans, and that’s something I didn’t feel  _ exploited _ by. I think any experience, no matter how glamorized to its customers, can work with transparency and genuine care for the people involved. Anything is possible.”

“But that leaves too much credit to miracles. I’m working on something here.”

She laughs at this, and he was surprised to find that getting a laugh out of a woman without a motive, like making Rey love him or at least let him come back another day, was a pleasant experience he hadn’t weighed out before. A lot of girls on set laughed at everything because they were nervous. Rose had her own version of that, but her genuine laugh was nice. It felt rewarding, but not in the obvious way of there being a  _ reward. _ Just a good feeling. 

“Well, like working here, there’s a lot of diversity of tastes. And you have to be encouraging, mostly to make a sale. But there are people who get off on torture porn and are nothing but courteous to their partners and then there’s the married, vanilla sex types that come in for lube and have no idea why their wife isn’t wet enough, and that’s because they aren’t considerate and skip foreplay which is a hugely destructive act in intimacy. You just have to...you have to see people as people, even when you’re selling something. I’ve lost sales over explaining that lube isn’t going to zap a marriage into a sexual success without learning how to perform oral sex on a woman. I have strong principles about these things, and so I sleep at night after selling bull-whips and gonzo porn to strangers by knowing I took every opportunity to try and make sure people express themselves in a healthy and safe manner. There’s an element of sex education and trying to use everything as a learning opportunity. Maybe if porn stars did condom demos, teen pregnancy would go down, or something.”

He considers her carefully. 

“Do you own this store.”

She waves a hand in a so-so motion. “I have enough stock in it that when the owner dies, it’s mine.”

That was a hell of a claim. With this strip mall, though, he believes her. It was between a highway and three desert hills. Such was the exchange of estate, by a semi-promise of death. 

“I’d like to have coffee with you sometime, and talk about this more. This is more of an existential question than a proposition, I hope you know, I appreciate your candor and you’re much more open than I am about these subjects. Rey and my conversations have a...personal context. And I’d like varying perspectives.”

She looks more open to the idea. “You have my email. But no threesomes.”

The bell above the door clatters. Ben flinches away as though he’s being caught, even though he’s an adult man and his fucking cock mould is stacked on a table across from them. If Rose noticed this, she’s too polite to say anything.

It’s the guy with the jacket from before. Not wearing the jacket this time, just army fatigues. 

“Sorry to ask, but, um, can I use your bathroom?”

It seems to hit him mid-question what kind of shop this is. Rose is frozen behind the counter. His face is twice as nervous because of it.

“You’re in luck because I actually just cleaned it!”

Ben softens to her even more then, because he’s sure he’s been no more eloquent many, many times around Rey. And then tries to hold down a gag over what she meant by being in luck that the bathroom was  _ clean. _

“Okay,” she points slightly across the store by a rack of porn VHSs. He didn’t know VHSs were available anywhere, but there must be a very sad market for them here, “just so you know. The lock. Twist it left, then right, and then ease up on it and hold the door  _ firmly _ shut-actually, I’m just going to write you instructions.”

She hunches over a post-it, scribbling frantically. 

“I’m Rose, by the way.”

“Uh, Finn.”

She smiles up at him, beams, really. Ben is in too deep to be witnessing this. At least he can pass this information on to Rey. Progress with the recruitment officer.

but progress just means they're talking. The poor girl blossoms under his attention, and he's not really...noticing her. Ben suppresses the vague instinct to kick his ass. 

The bathroom door closes with a series of jangling noises, apparently Rose’s several-steps of instructions.

Her phone lights up between them, the screen says DJ. 

**No I don’t need his password I’m a professional.**

“Sorry,” she motions to the phone. “Hacker friend of mine is emailing me about wiping someone’s hard drive. I only have it done under the most dire of circumstances.”

Ben takes off his glasses to wipe some crust out of his eye. Wow. He did not need to ask the million questions that brought up.

“Wait, _ you’re Kylo Ren?” _

He slides them back up his nose defensively. At this point, he’s told her enough. Rose might as well know.

“Yeah, I mean, you didn’t notice?”

“I had no idea!” 

She’s got this pretty but dazed smile on her face. He points behind him without looking away from her with an incredulous expression. “My face is all over those boxes. Like ten feet away.”

“That’s so crazy.”

“You really didn’t recognize me?”

He may be a little offended.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “Maybe it was the glasses.”

...

Being able to quantify anything in numbers made it easier.

She knew what day she started doing this because of bank statements. And that day must have been three days since he left the voicemail that changed her mind about writing him off as crazy, or self-serving. She knew how many hours a day she spent actively camming because there were analytics, and that must mean how many  _ with him. _ She knew who was paying what by tokens and profiles and this was all easier when they were icons, they were graphs, they were little green plus signs and pixelated images and numbers and nothing could touch her. 

Rey’s history had always felt impermanent. She had to count on vanishing to survive. She counted down, scratching the days until she turned eighteen with a pocket knife, into the wall of her childhood closet where her parents wouldn’t see. It was an altar that she worshipped at, the one permanent, unflinching object. She was girl who did the same thing every day until it was a blur, until it was a routine, until it was the work she did to get to feel like she was making all of this a little better, a little easier. 

Viewing numbers was a product of working backwards. Making the list of her days was trying to pretend she was marking the last one so she would know tomorrow that this time had passed. It’s what she felt at the first mark, and middle, and the last. 

She did not know how to make into a tangible object that Ben loved her. No tally marks of his affection. Hard to prove that he even said it. The air didn’t hold his words for her to wrap in a handkerchief for safekeeping.

The closest she gets is the video from the other night. She can’t stop watching. It’s made visual for her. 

Her stomach muscles tensing every time he speaks.

Her hips rolling when he praises her. 

Her eyes when he says it. 

She probably wouldn’t be able to know she was feeling it without this essential viewing. But it makes it a little easier. There’s this man who loves her, who let her hold the camera and watches her cum with so much in his eyes she feels scared to watch even the grainy footage of it.

There's a noise from down the hall.

The door to her apartment is opened  _ too _ cautiously. Ben has keys. This shouldn’t be weird. 

Though it’s like he isn’t going to come in unless she beckons from her room. And that, in the “I Love You” phase, with someone as emotionally tentative as Ben, fucking  _ terrifies _ her. 

“Ben?”

The door shuts, and with such a reserve she’s not sure what side of it he’s on, he could still well be in the hallway of her building, or halfway to the elevator. 

“Ben?”

She hears a quiet grunt, but doesn’t dare look up from the spreadsheet on her lap until he flops down next to her on the bed. His spine searches for her body, held stiff, brushing and vulnerable against her hip. She sets the computer aside, cuddling up to his broad back. 

“What happened?”

“I just-”

He doesn't seem to know where to start.

She shouldn’t have expected a breakthrough, or even for it to go well, but she is disappointed. Family is a golden concept to her; if it was a real one, everything must be accomplishable when they banded together. Unlike hers, which didn’t count, in her mind. She blocked it out. Not like  _ real _ family.

He lets out a frustrated breath. It’s obvious he’s holding back, when she gets a good look at his face. But she knows him. She’s seen ‘annoyed-at-his-mother’ before. That’s not it. 

Ben is fucking  _ devastated.  _

“What happened, baby?” she presses her face into his shoulder, guilt rising up in her throat. She made it worse. Fuck. She  _ ruined _ it-

“I just,” Ben says again, clicking his dry tongue, “My mother. We are both  _ so stubborn _ that we couldn’t disagree about this without destroying our entire relationship.”

He sounds so sad about it, like he’s drafted some thesis statement to their sprawling familial problems. 

_ “Baby,” _ Rey strokes his hair. He curls into her. “I’m so sorry.”

He shakes his head. His arms tighten around her. Holding her so damn well. 

“No, that’s not it. I think we’re both at a point where we’d rather have each other back. I’m just sorry it happened. It’s just...a lot of emotion.”

“I’m here,” she assures him. “No judgement. You’ve helped wash cum off of me, so you can cry in front of me if you need to.”

He lets off a dry chuckle. Relief.

“Can we talk about this later?”

She shrugs it off, kind of feeling that he already summarized and she can back off. If he said it was _fine,_ she’d have a knife to his throat, but he seems to know what went down, seems to be processing.

“Okay, but we’re going to.”

“Yeah,” he touches her face. Seeming to realize something. “She’d like you.”

This flutters in her chest in a way that shouldn’t feel as good as it does. But it does. Really.

“Hope I get to meet her,” she whispers. There’s almost no sound to it.

“What have we here?”

_ Busted. _

He reaches across her stomach, fingers brushing her laptop screen. “This looks familiar.”

His middle finger nudges her pixelated tit, which makes her shiver, even though he’s seen her boobs probably as much as she has.

She presses play. He crawls up the bed to watch over her shoulder. 

And they are just in time hear him to say _“I love you, Rey”_ from off-camera.

Something in her clenches. She closes her eyes, like a pleased cat, as Rey on screen  _ loses _ it.

“You didn’t say it back,” he observes.

She stops breathing. 

Their hot breaths and moans onscreen continue on without them. That’s odd thing about recording a moment. Watching it back always has a different context; an added layer. You never really get that same emotion back.

“Yeah,” she replies weakly. “I did call you _Daddy_ for the first time that night and judging from your reaction, I didn’t know how to top it.”

He keeps his eyes on the screen in her lap. He isn’t hurt, just curious. 

“You kind of... _kind of_ said it when I was in Vegas. On your show.”

She nods. 

“I was just wondering, Rey. It didn’t come up again.”

She is such a shitty person. When he falls asleep she is shoving "Kylo" down the garbage disposal and blocking GoingForSnoke off of all of her platforms.

“I’m sorry.”

“Weird thing to apologize for,” he looks carefully into her eyes, “Not being ready. That’s nothing to be sorry about.”

_ “I'm not ready,” he croaks out, and it’s so gentle and shy that her heart breaks. “Not like this.” _

_ “You don’t have to be ready,” she cups his chin. “You don’t have to be anything at all. It’s okay.” _

She tucks her face into his shoulder with a little whimper. He strokes her back, moving the paused laptop out of the way. 

“Nothing to be embarrassed about. Nothing to be ashamed of. But baby,” so quick, she’s on her back and pinned underneath him, “you have to tell me _why.”_

Such a seductive, careful tone. He's going to crack her open.

Rey has to talk about therapy today. Ben has to talk about his mother. But molten sex wins out because they can manage  _ this; _ Ben has a plan for her and they are going to get into  _ this _ thoroughly. She trusts him that much. 

“Tell Daddy why,” he teases, his voice so soft, “Why you’re scared to.”

Her thighs tighten around his hips, her fingers weaving in the ends of his hair. She fumbles his glasses out of the way onto the nightstand with shaking hands. He dips down to kiss her. 

But in the moments that follow, suddenly naked before she knows how and with sweet words and gentle caresses, she is not compelled to answer. She feels him upping the intensity; fingers stroking over her nipples and lips on all the right spots on her neck. She feels the tension inside her mount. But it’s not pressing words out of her like he normally does. She is a thing on the other side of a wall and she doesn’t even know how to start climbing. Entreating to her obedience, her need for praise and gentleness, he makes her cum with his fingers once, but it’s in silence, with no admittance achieved. Pliant, but not bent to his will.

And the orgasm precedes a panic that she has failed him. By not telling him. It does not feel earned yet to do so, but he’s so good, so maybe she should-

She doesn’t think he’s annoyed. He’s just as gentle as when he started. He’s caring for her. What she needs is…

What she needs is tough love.

Her hands fist in his hair. “I need you to  _ take this _ from me.”

There was no coaxing anymore. She needed rough, she needed someone knowing what to extract out of her soul, someone who understood her enough to use force to get it.

And it barely takes a second for him to roll off of her and remove his shirt.

He gives her a careful, considerate look in the eyes. And it’s everything right there. 

_ You can be just as broken as me. We’re going to help each other.  _

He lies on his back, motioning to the headboard. 

“Come up here. Not letting you off until you tell me.”

The words are dangerous, but she’s crawling up his body, his feral thing. She doesn’t need to be anything but that darkness inside her when she straddles his beautiful face.

He is true to his word; he clamps her hips in place with his hands and manipulates her into rough rolls across his tongue. There’s space for him to breathe, and to take his time, and she has longed to sit on this Grecian profile for months. So, while it’s happening, she accepts that this is a treat to soothe the burn-

_ Fuck. _

His tongue is so good. Her fingers card into his hair, curl around his scalp, press into the bone of his skull. He shakes his head against her, mouth somewhat filling her, and the tremble has her whole body coiled up like a snake ready to strike. It’s everything, maybe too much, and she knows she is seconds away from that too much becoming agonizing and that…

That will force every fucking thing he needs to hear out of her mouth.

He lifts her off his tongue.

“Why aren’t you ready, baby? To just say it out loud. You can say it in front of strangers but not to me? Is that not what you really feel? You lie to them so easily-”

_ “Not a lie,” _ she chokes out, trying to mash her hips down against him. He holds her steady, licking up instead of letting her ride her pleasure out from over him. 

She grabs the headboard and keens. Her thighs are taut and flushed. 

“I know you feel it too, sweet baby, I know. Everything I feel. You won’t lose me just by being shy. You’ll never lose me that easily.”

His insistent tonguing at her signs the contract. She’s stuck with him. It’s so much; overwhelming and scary and fucking perfect. 

“What do you need from me?”

She bears down, but he holds her up off of him. Her forearms drape across the headboard. She wants to cry. It’s to invasive, too deep, his tongue in her and his eyes peeking up from between her legs and he’s her fucking  _ throne. _

“I need…”

It feels selfish to ask for anything from the person who was ready to say it first. Greedy. But she does need.

“I need to feel a ten.”

His tongue against her clit stills for a second. He lifts her off, despite her horrified shriek, to press mouthy kisses there as he thinks. His slow pace, and cunt-wettened expression, is pensive. 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

She rolls her hips into a perfect, sucking kiss on her clit. He grabs the back of her knees so she stops trying to leverage her body weight to take what she wants.

“I need it. I just need to feel it once. I need to see you that way. I just want to know.”

His hand flattens across her belly, pushing her off his face. 

“You don’t deserve-”

“I don’t think anyone should be hit by you at a ten if you feel they _deserve_ to be hit that way.”  She crawls back, straddling his stomach. _“That's_ what sounds out of line to me. An eight is for punishment. An eight. For when I offer my body as an apology. Ten is for...what is ten for?”

He’s still confused, slightly dazed, and moving his tongue around his mouth in that way he does when it tastes freshly of her pussy.

“Ten was me making an estimate for how hard I could go. Top range. Rey, it’s not for us. Not for play, or discipline, or love.”

“Have you done a ten during a scene?”

His expression darkens. Yes. He definitely has. He clearly thinks it shouldn’t matter. 

But for some reason, it’s like, as long as she knows there’s a ten, she can’t calm down until she knows what it feels like. Even if it hurts. She just needs to know  _ him. _

She draws back. “I want an eight tonight.”

Ben is sitting up, she watches him reach for her but she stays firm. He’s so good when he’s gentle, and she wants  _ rough. _ Pleasure torture is not rough, it’s doting and a maybe little sadistic in how it doesn’t let up. It may have ripped less severe confessions from her; but she can’t let go over this. Even if she could have stayed over his face all night.

“I  _ have _ done something wrong,” she finally says. 

He raises his eyebrows. 

This is it. So much harder to say than anything else. 

She fucked up and needs him to be mean.

She needs him to punish her over all of this mess. This fucking wedge between them over GoingForSnoke’s bullshit. 

Over not saying  _ no _ quickly enough to something she knew would hurt him. 

Over betraying that abandoned kid who needs to look forward to this future she’s in and see Rey be brave enough to walk away from the things that are easy simply because they’re selfish.

And Ben swallows thickly. 

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! I'm not dead!
> 
> I figured I could cut this massive scene in half instead of delay the much-needed update to this story more. 
> 
> And thanks so much to Reylo Fanfic Bookclub and Ellie for selecting me for Fic of the Week! That absolutely made my summer.
> 
> I have a twitter and tumblr, as some of you know:  
> @secretreylo on twitter and secretreylotrash on tumblr.


	14. i get caught up, just for a minute

“Let me make it better,” Rey barely lifts her chin to insist, wriggling towards him on her belly.

A month ago, this would have been a sexual jackpot beyond his wildest dreams. 

But in the hours proceeding this invitation, he has no lack of evidence that this, as such offers are, psychosexually fraught. 

Ben hasn’t even considered  _ himself _ a feminist yet; discussing it with his mother was more of a topic of appeasing her and maybe finding some framework to relieve his guilt; the word, frankly, confuses him. The son of an academic  _ and _ a world-class smart-ass, there is that shit-eating ‘what even  _ is _ feminism, anyway?’ always rising up in his brain instead of working forwards with it. And there was a detachment to that subjective lens that obviously had to get him through many years of this industry. 

But in the context of Rey; did he treat her like she was made of glass, because the world had been unfair to a girl like her? Did he treat her without coddling, as a show of respect? Was it unfair to be precious with her just because she was female? Or was he blinded to ever understanding her because no good intentions could make him see things her way?

These were questions that battered him around her like a moth butting heads with a lamp.

The feminist thing to do about the spanking business was going to make his own brain eat itself; somewhere in the clash of the eroticization of violence against women, his arousal and equal disgust about the facets of it. 

Yet Rey asking for it: should he just take her word as an equal?

Here she is, naked and waiting, and here he is. Thinking. Like an idiot. 

“Okay.”

_ Smack. _

She lets out a horrid wail. Animalistic. And then picks herself back up again, her shoulders moving like a stalking lion’s. 

There’s a moment of terse silence where she waits for him to go again. 

He doesn’t. His brain is buzzing. 

The silence is interrupted by her sullen tone:

“That was a fucking  _ two, _ Ben Solo.”

To be fair to her, it is the most half-hearted spanking he has ever given. He has been more violent with houseflies. But it’s all he has the nerve to give. His palm feels clammy and his face is twisted up in a grimace.

“Yeah,” he mutters, annoyed, “because I don’t want to do this.”

Rey is on her belly, looking incredulously over her shoulder at him. It’s the weird, expectant, not-listening kind of focus on his hands, twisting nervously in his lap. Her back is still arched like he’s going to smack her ass full-steam at any moment. 

His tone is also too sulky for this to even feel like  _ a real fight, _ just the farce of one. 

She went very still when he said  _ he knew, _ and now she’s just staring, like the only thing she can connect with is the violence of it. Not violence, exactly. The currency. The exchange. 

She doesn’t trust that he’s letting her off the hook. His stomach coils. 

Her brow is furrowed. She’s trying to work this out. 

Then it just breaks. 

Her face presses into the pillow, there’s a quiet, mournful sound. But it’s still a little too posed, a little unsettling. 

“Rey,” he says weakly, but she shakes her head. 

“I want you to punish me.”

He lets go of the breath he’s holding. 

“You don’t deserve it.”

“You,” she accuses, arching up, “Are overthinking. I can fucking  _ hear _ it. If it makes me feel better, why do you have to apply some fucking master’s thesis to this? I need it from you.”

She’s cutting at him a little bit, but her tactics, it’s almost like she is  _ pushing _ him to get mad. 

She’s tough. She can handle it. Why is every reason  _ he should _ actively making him feel sick?

He doesn’t want to be another thing that makes her put on armor. 

“You are scaring the shit out of me right now.”

“I’m fine.”

“Rey, come on.”

_ “No. _ C’mon,  _ Ben.” _

“Reyyy,” he arches away when she rubs herself against his cock. “I don’t think you know how hardcore that is. It’s a lot to ask of you.”

He didn’t want to mock her experience level, but he can’t entirely hold in the laugh that comes out when she weakly, quietly because it’s somewhat spoken into a pillow, responds; _ “I want to be hardcore.” _

He leans forward, presses a kiss to the flesh of her ass. She shivers underneath him. She doesn’t even get the sweet satisfaction of his teeth. Just a kiss before he pulls away. 

“Hitting you over an actual problem is a bad idea,” he shakes his head. “That really blurs some lines for me. And you’re not getting that ten, sweetheart.  _ Ever.” _

“But  _ other  _ people-”

“I’m not doing everything with you I’ve done with other people. I can name five things that would make you kick me out of this apartment tonight.”

“But I want to see you at your most-”

“Rey,” his hand settles on her lower back. He heaves a frustrated sigh. “Rey, baby, ten was me...yes, it exists on the scale of how hard I can hit someone open-handed. Yes, it’s been used in scenes. But it was used in a different context and maybe it isn’t appropriate for  _ you.” _

In the hastily explained set of limits he had given her, the scale was a little arbitrary. It was a general range. Not like he had a spreadsheet of every spanking he’d ever given filled out, while working at Star Destroyer. 

_ Holy shit.  _

Snoke. 

He keeps almost forgetting in the landslide of emotions. 

It’s like a fucking moment of clarity. He stares down at her suspiciously, and she has a somewhat caught expression. 

_ She’s distracting him from the problem.  _

“Rey, I’m not doing an eight now so you can feel like we don’t have to have this argument.”

“Why?”

“Because  _ I don’t want to.” _

She lets out a shaky breath. 

_ I don’t want to _ was a paranoia of hers; that she was pushing him beyond his means to give because he was scared of losing her. That he really didn’t want to. That from the beginning she had been using someone in the way she never wanted to be used again. 

There is also an element of betrayal there, for anyone familiar with shame;

_ No I don’t want to do that because it’s dirty and you’re wrong for wanting it.  _

He’s in the same industry. He knows how that shame coils nasty and dark in the back of everyone’s mind; existing on a societal fringe. Existing as oneself having to be some kind of statement. The casual relationship with the word “slut” and trying to reframe the perfectly neutral act of sex from the sides that rip in violently back and forth from “validating” and “degrading”.

But Ben keeps wanting to be there on the other side. He’s here now, touching her gently. His naked body anything but erotic against hers, like puppies huddling for warmth in sleep, seeking body heat and the comfort of touch.

“You said you wanted to feel the worst, to even feel like you could love me.”

She lets out a tense breath. “I suppose that’s what it came out like.”

“Jesus,” he keeps rubbing her hip absently. “So we’re just simulating a different kind of masochism? What’s next, role-playing me leaving you, or something? Just so you know what it feels like before you commit?”

She gives him a deadly look. A slight weave to the side like a snake that’s threatening to strike. She may throw back something meaner.

He tries to talk back into her eyes. 

_ I will forgive you just get to the point where you can talk about it. _

It’s a little too far, but they could keep going discussing the transgressions of an inappropriately timed spanking all night. 

He’s getting a migraine. And the Snoke shit has still been left untouched and slowly growing cold. 

“Rey,” Ben strokes comforting hands up and down her thighs, “The note. I know. It’s okay.”

She looks like he’s losing her already. It’s a painful sight to watch. She just lies there, waiting for him to take it in the direction he wants to, but it’s like her vision is burrowing backwards through her eyes. Drowning him out. 

And here he was waxing poetic about the academic way to approach this. Like Rey is a text. She’s a fucking  _ person. _ He lets out a frustrated sigh and the careful, tender, hand-holding reveal crashes out because she’s tough and she can handle it and always treating her like his little princess had spoiled her for  _ this _ evening. 

“Snoke  _ owns _ Star Destroyer.” 

“Huh?” her brow is furrowed in confusion.

Oh, shit. Hand-holding and cuddling and tender reveals was the plan for a good reason, he just got caught up with her sitting on his face after watching their homemade porn and then immediately abandoned the whole plan, that he carefully drafted sitting in a parked car instead of coming straight home, because he loved her.

Or was procrastinating just as badly as Little Miss  _ ‘please spank me I’ve been bad but not in a way I want to verbalize or have a conversation about.’ _

They were fucking messes. 

She may just be the love of his life. 

He tries to rein back in the tenderness he had planned. He touches the side of her face with barely any strength in his fingers. Annoyed, she pushes her face into his hand as if to say  _ touch me, you pathetic baby.  _

That’s his girl. 

“It probably was a lure to get you back doing scenes, because of the success of your show.”

Rey blinks at him, then sits up. 

It’s like she’s finally fully awake. 

_ “What?” _

“Hux was pressuring me, as you know, which I refused. But the username, the money, the note; I think he’s trying to open a dialogue that shouldn’t even be a dialogue because you said  _ no _ to this company and its practices.”

Her eyes narrow suspiciously.

“And just how long have you known?”

There’s a relief in the fact that she’s  _ pissed  _ that he knew about her mysterious benefactor. 

Arms crossed over her naked chest with a look that could end him. His cheeks feel slack as he stares guiltily at her.

“Just this morning.”

And a huff that comes out of her lets him know that they’re taking this one thing at a time: and this will be addressed later. 

But there’s a moment where her expression trembles, it’s complicated to watch. Disgust and relief and horror and she sits back against the headboard and laughs at herself, at him, at them, and shakes her head until she quiets. 

“I think we found the one problem sex can’t fix,” she jokes mirthlessly, like it’s the first thing she can say. 

“So tell me what this is really about.”

Her brows raise and he eyes go distant. She shakes her head firmly. 

He lets out a frustrated grunt. “Rey, tonight is going to suck, but if you commit to going through it with me, it might actually fix things.”

Her forearms are held tight against her chest, it’s just legs and the line of her jaw she lets him see. 

Further illustrating his point:

“This already sucks.”

He laughs, a little relieved. Her resistance is at least being present instead of totally shutting down. 

“And neither of us are at our best right now, and we’re going to be assholes to each other for a little bit. We can just admit that and keep going.”

“Don’t call me an asshole.”

Her tone is defensive, but not  _ gone _ or desperate.  _ This _ is his girl. Brushing herself off and pushing back. Not bracing herself for the abuse of this unfair universe. He can take bratty Rey over one trying to punish away whatever she thinks she did wrong.

To illustrate her annoyance, her tense legs fall into his lap. He doesn’t touch, her feet find purchase against his thighs in the crook of his hips. She may just...end him, someday, but all he needs right now is to not end themselves tonight. 

“Wanted to feel it,” her eyes are on the wall opposite to him, “In case you ever lost control. It was like this phantom for me. The other side of you. I don’t know if I can keep up. And I want to.”

There’s a lot in his world he doesn’t want to share with her. Not in a way that she has to experience it. Even rehashing; once when she made a joke about a scene with Phasma she had once watched without him there and he startled away as if burned. It wasn’t shame that it existed, it was shame that it informed her about him as a person.

But he did it, so he had to accept that.

“Not about keeping up with me. I just want to be with you. You don’t have to be everything, or nothing, Rey. You’re enough to me.”

She takes a deep breath through her nose. Again, a methodical, dry tone, heavily counseled by her therapy. He’s actually thankful, for once, that their incident wound her up in therapy because he can’t imagine what this conversation would have looked like with her months ago when it’s this hard  _ now.  _

“There’s always going to be trust issues. With me. And it’s not...even I need to learn it’s not about proving things quickly, or bargaining like  _ ‘if you do this, you must really love me’  _ because that’s just going to aggravate the problems I already have. I hate this. But I am  _ trying _ for you.”

That may be the most romantic thing he’d ever heard. 

“That’s all I want, Rey.”

She closes her eyes and nods. This is physically taxing her, he can tell. 

“Tell me what  _ you _ know,” she adds, her nostrils flaring slightly. His hands settle on her knees.

“I found out about this because my mother was ragging on Snoke owning the company and the name was familiar. I looked up the email to be sure, from some of the invoices. It’s tightly secure, but I don’t think he wanted to be entirely discreet.”

Her shoulders relax a little. 

“Wow,” she stares at the covers, those botanical-sketch sheets he wants to be buried in someday, and strokes up a stem of a dandelion. There’s a sadness on her face, but maybe something there like she doesn’t entirely  _ deserve _ to feel used, and it kills him. It’s fucked, no matter what she was considering. He was never going to hit her tonight with any force because she didn’t deserve to be  _ hurt. _ “Okay.”

There’s something quiet there, that she doesn’t share with him. He doesn’t want to ask for it. This is both the easiest decision and the most massive undertaking of her life. And they can’t do anything now. It would be like stopping halfway through a heart surgery to plan how to stitch the chest back up.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and cups his chin in her hands. To let him find her in her eyes.

“I think...there can be a time where we can go back to the rules.”

He nods, covering her hands with his. 

“But you have a point about tonight.”

Their eyes are locked. She wets her lips. 

“You always made sure I was so ready for everything, and I was trying to overwhelm myself. I didn’t want to be ready. I wanted...I wanted to not think. I had a rough therapy session.”

He raises his eyebrows. There’s a few beats where she fights, in her face, that she has to tell him more than that eventually.

“We were talking about the offer.”

He nods. 

Her eyebrow, just one, rises on her face, poised accusingly. “You look guilty.”

He really, really hopes he can get good at hiding a damn thing from her, if he has to take an oyster-shucker to her heart in order to get her to even admit she’s unhappy. 

“I am.”

She gets out of bed. Puts on a sweatshirt.

He sits up. 

“I can explain-”

Rey shrugs, flipping her hair free from the neck of the hoodie. All business. 

“I want to wear clothes to talk about this. I want to not have to balm it over with you trying to sex-soothe the truth out of me. I don’t even want you running this conversation. We’re going to talk. Like adults. Get dressed.”

He’s stunned. In a daze, he reaches for his shirt, fumbles his clothes back on. She just watches him dress, then pulls on a pair of sweatpants. 

When he’s covered, and she’s covered, she doesn’t move right away. 

“Tea?” she finally asks, and he nods. They take it to the kitchen, a more neutral ground. 

Tea seems to be an invitation back to the conversation, but only when it’s ready. She leans on the counter, munching on a cookie as the water boils. While they wait for the kettle, he does put his arms around her and squeezes. She squeezes back before retrieving two mugs. 

They settle on opposite ends of the island with their warm drinks.

Rey looks into the steam before she looks up at him. Gathering her strength.

"Never ever fucking make a joke about leaving me."

He tenses up. That was abrupt.

"I wasn't-"

“Giving you a reason to leave,” her voice is quiet and dry, “when I already let myself care for you. There’s nothing that makes me hate myself more.”

He thumbs a dark spot on the wood grain countertop.

"I'm sorry."

She nods, looking away. Her face is drawn, holding back some explosive reaction to the words that upset her. Cutting the pain off at the source.

“Not leaving," he adds. "Not ever.”

“Tonight isn’t over,” but at this she smiles sheepishly, looking in his eyes. 

“Tell me about holding on to this offer.”

There’s a faintly soothed look on her face. He could have been meaner about what she did, but instead, it’s merciful. He could have accused her of lying, or going behind his back on something she knew would make him uncomfortable. Using his dick as a prop. 

Instead, he’s focusing on her, and what she’d be feeling, and it softens her to him. Her posture relaxes. 

“It was such a stupid reason.”

“Tell me why.”

“Money,” she shrugs. It’s a pathetic shrug, there’s a feral self-awareness that begs him to not pity her. 

“Because of what you came from?”

“I came from nothing,” she shakes her head like it doesn’t hurt. But he knows. Maybe someday she can tell him all about it.

_ A tight casting couch shot, everyone knew the one. Girl with crossed arms and knees pressed demurely together. Punctuating awkward answers with laughter. Trying to be game, to be the one, to be the watchable thing.  _

_ The ever-present behind the camera voice: _

_ “Why did you come to LA?” _

_ Rey laughed defiantly.  _

_ “To make money.” _

_ And that’s where it started.  _

Kylo Ren had watched it, too. Casually, sent to him by Hux. When this was the girl he would be working with next. Before she was just Rey.

He can’t pity her now. He can only deepen the love he has for this beautiful girl who was so fucking complicated and had upended his life since the moment he first made her smile.  

It’s time for her to learn the lesson that he suffered through for her;

The hardest thing about love was having someone to know when you’re better than this.

He tries to balm it over with carefully selected words:

“Here’s what we’re going to-”

“Or,” Rey’s tone is flat. “You can stop telling me what we’re going to do and just have a conversation.”

He snorts. The bulldozing him is a little cute when he almost had to smack the truth out of her, from her perspective, just an hour ago. 

“You used to need that to open up to me, remember?”

“You’re the one who didn’t want to be a dom tonight. You’re demoted.”

“To what?”

She thinks about it for a minute. “My boyfriend.”

He leans back from the counter with a groan. She almost thinks he’s not even going to share the thoughts spilling from his wry expression, but he mutters  _ “That’s what I wanted to be this whole fucking time.” _

She shrugs. 

“Well, we’re really bad at this.”

A conversation. He can do that.

“Was there a part of you that wanted to say yes?”

She stirs the tea in her mug, which means  _ yes.  _ But she thinks before she speaks.

“You were being controlling...about me.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise, he’s a controlling motherfucker, but it still makes him defensive to have her point it out.

“Was I?”

His tone is trained not to sound hurt. He obviously is. She closes her eyes, groaning.

“It  _ felt _ that way. The whole penetrative sex thing, it did hurt, emotionally, this idea you had that it was going to  _ ruin _ me. Like it was punishing me for not being able to-  _ This _ made me feel in control. Capable. You said I couldn’t, but what if I could? What if I did?”

The  _ ten _ starts to make sense to him. Not that he should; but why she wanted it. It was like he had made a part of himself she couldn’t have because he made it sound like she couldn’t handle it. Not like the truth: that there was a part of him he was deeply ashamed of and was trying to change for her. Walking back the damage he had done was hard enough. He didn’t want to cause more of it. 

But she would always feel what he was holding back. 

As if she was not the competitive, headstrong person that would slap down a freshly-fucked, fully wet  _ Kylo _ in front of him like a fresh kill and told him she took  _ all of it _ because he said she couldn’t.

"I was ashamed of myself, not you."

Her mouth purses, her own eyes fluttering at the realization. 

"I felt like the problem, when you have sex with..."

So many other women. She can't say it. But it's true. He can imagine that hurt her a lot, him not minding at all if he was too big for anyone else, and then being very precious about her tight vagina. On top of the malnourishment and the shame of her own body-

“You were right,” he surrenders, nodding, “It didn’t destroy you. It may have destroyed  _ me, _ but you handled it better than I did.”

She rolls her eyes, but her face is soft. 

“I was fine with you not being ready,” she wants him, needs him, to know that. “That’s when I really started to understand where you were coming from. I almost spite-fucked your fake cock when you made it about what  _ I  _ can handle.”

He nods, his voice softening. 

“You almost had me do a lot of kind of destructive things tonight.”

He is telling her this. He is telling her this in a moment as the person in control. That she had violated some kind on contract, however unwittingly. And if wasn’t accusing. It was clarifying, admitting a failure of his; he as the dominant party was the one who left things murky. 

There’s already forgiveness in her eyes. 

“I get it now, it’s not like before. It wasn’t coaxing something out of me, even like what you were doing by eating me out, or me tying you up before. I was asking for something that I  _ thought _ was the same.”

She shouldn’t have made him try to take what should have been given.

Her face shifts with the attempt to hold back a joke, but his eyes are already smiling adoringly at her. She can’t hold it back;

“So I can still ask for a spanking when you’re mad because I drank all that gross iced tea you leave in my fridge?”

“Baby,” and she closes her eyes when he says it, “you can have everything you want. But I know you well enough to know when you don’t want to be in pain.”

She looks away. 

“I like spankings, sometimes,” she murmured, “I liked the eight, when we did it.”

“You  _ weaponized _ it, you little minx,” he leans back in his seat with a fond smile. She smiles cruelly at him. 

“I like to take back what hurts me.”

Someday he’ll know it all. He can’t pretend to now. It’s agony. But she watches his face carefully as he accepts this, and his silence seems to pass some test. 

“What are you going to do about Snoke?”

Rey wanders purposefully into her bedroom and gets her laptop. 

“I’m  _ really _ tired, so this is something I’m worrying about tomorrow. For now, blocking,” she looks up at him as she logs in. “Also, you can throw  _ Kylo _ away. He’s in the drawer in the camroom.”

His mouth twists. There’s a weird look in his eye. She doesn’t press.

He may not do that immediately, there are still _ideas_ for it, but it’s not the night to crack into this.

Rey raises her eyebrows, there’s a flurry of clicking which must mean she’s doing just what she said she’d be doing.

“Are you okay? I know it’s a lot to turn down, money-wise-”

She looks up at him, unflinching. “It’s for you. You understand what it means to me. I want you to understand that it’s what I’d do for you. So I’m happy,” she shakes her head a little. There are tears dotting the corners of her eyes. “Because this was something I would have done when I was alone. And I’m not.”

He grasps her hand from across the kitchen counter and presses a kiss to it. She blushes. 

He laughs softly, and the words are flying out of him before he really thinks it through:

“Rose and I were talking-”

Her expression turns a little sour. She glances up at him from over the edge of the screen.

“From the sex shop? When were you talking to Rose?”

For the months of longing for Rey, needing every piece he could get, wondering what she was doing when he wasn’t there and wishing for her to fill the space when he was without her; the territorial look in her eyes is something to behold. No jealous. Territorial. If it weren’t for the somber occasion, he’d be half-hard already. That and the look in her eyes that tells him she’s going to murder him.

“Um, before I came here.”

_ “What?” _

“I…” 

_ Shit. _

Nervous energy causes him to clear their empty mugs into the sink, rinsing them out, disposing of tea bags.

“I may have stopped into her shop. Just to talk about some ideas.”

Rey watches incredulously from her spot by the counter. She’s hunched over in what he mockingly has called her ‘business stance’ where she wants to look closely at the screen with her arms crossed on the counter and has her feet planted wide apart on the floor to be low enough, effectively making her ass stick out behind her with her legs in a big triangle. 

He’s never seen that pose with such a pissed expression.

“You found out about Snoke and didn’t come  _ straight here?” _

“When I got here you wanted me to  _ hit you _ to get out of having an argument!”

The computer slams shut. He winces. 

“I obviously didn’t know the whole story yet!”

“You know how I said that we’re  _ both _ assholes tonight?”

“Fuck,” she snaps at him, then goes into the cupboard and pulls down a bag of cookies. “I thought you were getting dinner with your  _ mother  _ or something.”

She grumbles to herself as she eats, half-feral, crumbs flying everywhere.

“No, we’re not in that place yet. I was trying to...process. I had googled the Snoke stuff and needed to go for a drive.”

Rey shakes her head as she chews. This is the angriest way he’s ever seen someone eat an Oreo. “Going to fucking kill you. You actually went to a  _ sex shop _ before you told me about Snoke.”

“We both didn’t want to fight. I still like my way better.”

There’s black dust all over her mouth, and she covers her face with her hands and groans. She peeks between her fingers. 

“Are you okay?”

A hand rubs over her mouth, and it’s such an abrupt question he doesn’t know how to answer it. She glances up sheepishly, heel of her palm covering her mouth. 

“It bothered me, but when I found out about Snoke, I was more protective of you than upset about you being paid to fuck yourself with my celebrity tie-in dildo. And even then, I’m probably still going to hunt them all down and shoot them into the sun.”

“I feel that way,” her voice is quiet, “about the footage of me that he owns.”

And there’s a shaky breath.

“He was going to trick me into making more, and I almost fell for it.”

“Were you close to that point?”

She sniffles for a second, and then shakes her head. “If I had known, though, I never would have sat on this for as long as I did. Even  _ thinking _ about it makes me feel so ashamed.”

_ “Yeah,” _ and as he brushes past her to put the kettle in the sink, he gives her maybe a  _ 1.5 _ swat on the ass in passing. It isn’t even hard enough to kill a fly if he was trying to get it off her. She still jumps about three feet in the air when his hand lands on her and chases him around the kitchen, cackling.

_ “That’s _ for forgetting that I like lemon in my tea,” he tells her without a hint of malice, and she snickers into her hands. 

“You’re a monster.”

He nuzzles his face into her neck. Touch feels good. Like it did before. Not like that vois they almost got sucked into on her bed. “I  _ punished  _ you.”

“I get it,” she shakes her head. “You’ve proven your point.”

“I’m not  _ never _ going to give you what you need,” he pulls her over to the couch. A somewhat non-neutral zone, considering the conversations  _ and _ sex they’ve had here.

_ “I get it,” _ she repeats, a little annoyed he’s still explaining. “We needed to talk first.”

She stands in front of him and doesn’t sit down.

“However, “ she looks pointedly at him. “A lot of this is because of the way you’ve steered this relationship. We keep having sex to prove things.”

He can own up to that. 

“In the beginning it felt like the only thing to keep you anchored to me.”

His voice comes out quieter than intended. She stops to look at him for longer than he wanted her to. It makes him fidget, feel exposed, maybe how she’s been forced to feel all night.

The implied  _ I thought that was my use _ is so obvious that he sees her throat chord as a defensive reaction, kind of ashamed. That she ever made him think she’d tolerate Ben just to have Kylo. 

“I probably picked porn for a reason. I thought it could keep me tethered to something as well.”

“Like what?”

She laughs. 

“Reality, maybe.”

And he can relate to that. When his choice of work was the most base human instinct and his most base human instinct was work; navigating his sexuality was complicated. An awkward kid with his own internalized issues with women, he liked having that part handled and through a heavily professional barrier. He’d had brief flings, with people in and out of his industry, but the dates were loaded with the avoidance or maybe intrigue of what he did for a living. He didn’t want to be someone’s porn star boyfriend. Just like Rey didn’t want to ride that line of the just vulnerable enough fake girlfriend Camgirl. 

Rey is withdrawn, like she wants to make things right, make things up to him, but needs her privacy to figure out how. 

“You’re a physical person. I’m not above admitting I will take what I can get when it comes to your needs. If it’s with you. If it’s what you want.”

Rey places her hands on his shoulders. She leans back to look at him. 

“I need to go to bed,” she murmurs finally, her eyes on his. “I need to feel like I can fix this.”

He shrugs. “It’s not impossible. Just be honest with me. Just breathe.”

“I’m…” she brushes her fingers along his collarbones. There’s want there, but not the kind that had her blinded and terrifying. Ironically, his fantasy was always this limitless Rey. Some kind of lust-goddess that would devour him. There was always the need there to get her to let go, break, for him to pick up pieces. But that came with a stark responsibility. He had to be capable of that; and Rey was always better at fixing herself than he was. 

But he finally stops trying to fight that, because Rey has not told him the whole story, and he can’t intuit everything no matter how authoritatively he tries.

“I love you,” he interrupts, blurting it out, and her lips still over her teeth, mouth slightly agape, and her thumbs rub up and down his neck soothingly. He shakes his head when he sees the flash there in her eyes - her almost instinct to say it back-

This night sucks for a reason, and if they topped it off with her reluctant return of his feelings, he’d never forgive himself. It would feel too pressured.

They sit for a moment with the fact he doesn't need her to say it until she's ready.

“I’m sorry I’m hurting you,” she admits. “I want to take care of you.”

“Hmm?”

Her mouth twists, looking at the floor. Shame. He squeezes her hips anxiously. 

“Tell me.”

“Get in my bathtub?” she looks so nervous around him. “Like I did for you?”

He stands so suddenly she almost falls backwards, but he catches her around the waist. Half of him wants to carry her to the bathroom. But she’s the one on aftercare detail tonight. He’s the one proving he can handle it.

He presses his brow to hers.

“Take care of me,” he says finally, his whole body relaxing as it comes out of him. He needs it. 

It’s a weird feeling, being led where he’s already led her. Her hand in his. Her shaking hands drawing a bath, when his were so methodical in the same action. She doesn’t care  _ less, _ she cares differently, and she’s trying to show it in her way even when it’s not out loud. Ben entered this relationship  _ needing _ to be the one with the answers. It was a way of righting wrongs. He had injured her on a porn set. She was looking for how to quit and have a career with the one skill she came to LA with. He had never really examined the expectations there until tonight; he had to tell her how their partnership would work, he had to tell her how spankings worked, he had to tell her how this relationship would work.

Becoming essential had made it easier than trying to be wanted, and taking the steps backwards to just being wanted was now essential. Otherwise…

Rey would need a ten. Rey would need an eight. Rey would need the money, Rey would need the dom, Rey would be the girl at the end of every porn narrative; fucked.

Getting naked for her is odd. He stands, vulnerable in her bathroom, until she motions for him to get in. She pulled a tank top on instead of the sweatshirt, the steam makes her arms sticky and soft as she coaxes him into the water. She sits where he sat mere weeks ago. When she was nearly blown out on orgasms and staring at him with longing, wet eyes.

He is blown out on emotions, probably looking just as wrecked now as she strokes a soft washcloth over his chest. 

“Hmm,” she murmurs, as he nuzzles into her touch. “You’re good for me, baby.”

“You deserve that.”

She kisses his cheek. Her headspace is a little more closed off, doting, but he’s been there in the same way for her and honestly if she wants pliant, she’ll get pliant. If it’s what it takes.

This may be a little too soon; but what are they but sincerity in eight layers of kink.

She likes playing with his wet hair. His lips puff up lushly pink from the hot water. His whole body is slick, and she toys with him, not drawing a fierce arousal but a neediness. Little kisses on his neck. Sliding her tongue across his nipples. Cupping his cock under the water.

There’s a little hope there.

“Are we-”

She shushes him. “Not tonight.”

She’s in charge. Her refusal  _ burns _ , but he merely whimpers and accepts it. 

“But you can cum, my good boy.”

Her hand slides confidently along his cock. He bucks into her touch. The furrow of his brow is so vulnerable, she finds herself kissing it as he breathes hard against her neck. 

“I don’t feel good,” he admits, “I feel like I screwed up.”

She makes another  _ shush _ noise, but it’s soothing. “I forgive you.”

“We just keep tangling up-”

“We’ll figure it out. It’s okay. I’m sorry, baby.”

She watches his thighs tense under the water, fascinated. His knees stick out of her tub awkwardly. They both have to get in there someday, even if the fit would be tight. 

“So good,” she kisses his ear the way she knows he likes. “Eating my pussy so nice when I’m shy. Not letting me go. Not letting me hurt. Loving me,” her voice drops shyly at the mention of it.

He whimpers and closes his eyes. “I adore you.”

“I know.”

She lets him kiss her neck, his needy lips seeking her skin as he struggles not to lose control over her strokes. He feels as safe as she wants him to. With her kneeling by his warm bath, touching him so gently. It’s the apology she can’t phrase. It is the strength she had to resist their almost assured destruction. They could be fucked up. 

But he loves Rey because she was fucking tough.

“Cum for me.”

His head falls back against the tile wall behind him, his eyes cloudy. She feels something inside her  _ drop out _ at his cock pulsing in her palm.

Love is a weird word for her. It feels like performing. Like that camgirl when he was in Vegas. Loving her out of town boyfriend. Popping the word out of her mouth like a cockhead.

She would rather be here than at the other side of it, feeling like everything was _settled_ because she said a word. She was showing it, wasn’t she?

Was that enough?

His big, vulnerable brown eyes are trying to read her, even in his haze, and tell her  _ yes. _

“Emotionally,” she finally touches him, his lips, as though curious, “Tonight was a ten.”

“How’d you like your ten?” He cracks a smile. “Was it good for you?”

There’s an ironic humor in just how  _ unamused _ she is. “Ten fucking sucked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was really, really crippling for me to write because 13 had two very adverse reactions; people either really wanted or really didn't want to see a spanking come out of this. 
> 
> I was really, really nervous about upsetting either side of this; one, because Rey didn't deserve to be punished, but it wasn't Ben bringing that logic into it. Two, because Rey was in a bad place and trying to get out of an argument by dragging out explicit consequences for her actions that Ben did not consent to. And three, because there are healthy depictions of kink in this story and the biggest thesis-y thing I can apply to this story is _context is fucking important_. This is why Ben normalizes them looking in each other's eyes, and meditating, and self care. If that had happened in 13, yeah, sure, an eight, then let's throw in a ten for kicks: but Rey and Ben not communicating is not going to lead to that. 
> 
> I do not want their choice of "neither" coming across as kink-shaming or implying that dom/sub relationships are unhealthy. But they are people who had an unhealthy interaction and I didn't want to cross a line you can't jump back from. 
> 
> I can't please everyone; this story is a huge example of that. It's really polarizing, I really wish I could be free from the general discourse of not getting why it's popular (when I still never felt comfortable thinking that it was) but that would probably mean I'd have to sacrifice some really amazing people who were incredibly kind to me, and I have to accept the two halves of this experience. 
> 
> That being said; I am a 23 year old idiot. Thank you for letting me be a 23 year old idiot. I want to deserve the readers who have been so good to me. I want to write this story in the best way I can. But I think I need to detach from trying to please everyone, and just write it for me.


	15. and make 'em all dance to it

“Feeling better?”

She doesn’t want to think about _better._ She wants to think about his fingers in her hair, combing through it, massaging her scalp, and nothing else for all time.

She tilts her face up to sun, toying with the edge of the blanket under her.

“I don’t like who I was last night.”

He hums behind her, his lips easily pressed to her shoulder. He can still bear to touch her. She hasn’t ruined that much yet.

He removes his hands from her hair and instead _yanks_ at the tie of her bikini top, startling her with the instinct she was about to be exposed; but the top stays on.

This act does, however, keep her from drifting away. She grunts the moment she realizes it, barely re-tying the strings back in place. Rolling her eyes at his clever trick.

She digs her toes in the sand. His thumb coats itself in some sunscreen on her back that wasn’t rubbed in all the way when she applied earlier, circling until it spreads evenly over her freckles.

“We don’t always have to like you,” he reasons generously, touching her arm with a cold drink from the cooler. She turns over her shoulder, away from the ocean, for the first time since they’ve sat down on their blanket.

They’re here for her.

Waking up after the night before was hard. Facing the next day was harder. She felt hungover from crying, guilty from the events of the evening, confused from the words.

His first words when their opened eyes met were “How are you feeling?”

He was touching her face. He was looking in her eyes like nothing changed.

Then why did she feel so shaky and ashamed? Why was understanding herself the furthest thing from her capabilities in that moment?

And the answer was _“like shit.”_

So he took her to the beach in relative silence. She doesn’t remember him even saying anything about going to the beach. Just that he was suddenly in the kitchen packing towels and her cooler bag and that getting out of bed to put on a bikini was so fucking _absurd_ it was maybe the only thing on earth she could actually get out of bed to do that morning.

Looking over her shoulder, she places her hand on the knee bent by her side. Touching him. Feeling grounded by it. She sighs, snapping open the pop top of her soda. Her cheeks are red from the exposure to the sun. Sloppy application of sunscreen; distracted. He clicks his tongue chidingly, rubbing more from the bottle between his fingers and dotting it under her eyes, down her face, sweeping with his thumbs. She nurses her soda with a roll of her eyes until he’s done, listening to the waves.

“Are _you_ okay?”

He nods, she doesn’t really believe the sight from the corner of her eye, and twists from her seat in front of him as if to make him repeat the gesture.

“I’m fine,” he says from the shade, under his sunglasses, the umbrella tilting low to cover him like a fashionable victorian lady’s hat.

“After everything I said to you about...about…”

It bubbles out of her nearly bare chest. An almost-sob. Because she has been ashamed all morning, unable to talk with the hours of words circling in her head. The well of humiliation that she can’t uncork for a single replenishing mouthful. It can’t be plugged back up. “I’m a fucking hypocrite.”

Ben is quiet, sipping his iced tea. He seems unimpressed with the self-flagellation. He’s usually the one to throw himself at her feet and tell her she did nothing wrong. Now, Ben is just quiet. Thoughtful.

“I think context was important. You pressuring me, as the person you were viewing as _in power,_ until I had to tell you an explicit _no_ doesn’t exactly make me feel like a victim. You weren’t inside me, or even touching me. Yeah, maybe it was peer pressure, but you backed off because I’m an adult man and I just said _no_ like Nancy Reagan taught me.”

“Don’t...rationalize it.”

She doesn’t like that he’d do that for her. She doesn’t want excuses. She wants consequences.

But that’s what got them here to begin with. In a dangerous place.

He lowers his sunglasses.

“If you couldn’t hurt me, Rey, none of this would matter. I’m still going to love you even when we both don’t _like_ you in the moment.”

He nudges her leg with his bare foot.

“If the roles were reversed,” she tries, her tone clipped, but he presses the arch of his foot against her hip.

“If the roles were reversed? If a physically fit man almost a foot taller than you who you love asks you to spank him as your submissive and you say _no_ and he persists and you still say _no_ and he then backs off once he knows you really don’t want to? What is the parallel you’re trying to make? That what happened made both of us uncomfortable so we can’t still care about each other?”

She spins to sit cross-legged in front of him. Away from the crashing waves. Her teeth are clenched.

“I feel very strongly about what happened to me on set. I never want to make anyone feel that way.”

“And I _made_ you feel that way. Does that mean I never get to be forgiven?”

She opens her arms, gesturing around her.

“I’m fucking _here,_ aren’t?”

He looks a little pleased to make her mad. For them. Defending _them._ If only for a moment.

He looks down at the sand.

“What happened is I didn’t hit you.”

“I don’t want you to treat me like I can’t do anything wrong. I don’t want you to say that it’s different every time I do something to you. It’s not different to me. Your feelings aren’t different than mine.”

He’s voiced a lot of his feelings to her. He lifts his eyes, nervous, as though that’s the first thing he thinks of when she says that.

She closes her eyes.

She’s not going to say it back. But it’s close, and she lets it lie there between them instead of running away.

He’ll call it progress.

“I can’t do a transactional relationship with you anymore. Because I love you, and I’m still going to no matter what you _deserve_ in the moment. Even when we don’t like you. Even when you sneering at my feelings like they’re shameful makes me want to take you over my fucking knee.”

Her back stiffens.

He sighs, and pulls her down to lie with her back against him.

“If you want to fucking sulk about how not hurt I am after I have made it my life’s work to make you beg me for things, then sulk,” his lips brush over her ear. “I’m just going to keep loving the shit out of you, and you’ll have to fucking deal, okay?”

He squeezes his arms tight around her. He feels her stop breathing.

Then go lax against him.

He keeps going:

“You put the work in last night. You were so fucking good, not just for me, but for us. For yourself. I know how hard that is for you. I’m proud of you.”

She’s quiet, passing the can from hand to hand as she squints at the ocean in front of them.

"No one's ever told me that," she says quietly, and her voice finally tells him the depths in which she has been broken, "not like...you know. That way. Before you."

She hums, circling the cloudy condensation on the aluminum with her fingers. He squeezes, trembling in his hunched shell around her.

"I. am. so. fucking. proud. of. you."

She kisses his hand. "Thanks, baby."

Rey clears her throat, like that's enough vulnerability for the moment.

"You shouldn’t be ashamed of how you feel for me. I’m ashamed because I don’t know how to reciprocate that.”

“Well, it would be super boring if you did everything right. I thought that’s why you like being a brat. Conflict.”

She hisses out of her nose. “Controlled chaos.”

Her hand lands over his foot. Examining the pale skin, the length of his toes. No one’s paid so much attention to his feet before, but she just touches with curious fingers, her brow wrinkled in focus. It's not sexual, it's just. Oh. This is _his_ foot. This person I kind of adore.

“I want to tell you something.”

“Tell me something,” she responds humorlessly, but calmly.

“Final straw was last night. I’m supposed to be at a shoot right now. Star Destroyer can go fuck themselves.”

_“Ben…”_

She _would_ admonish him for skipping work over quitting the _actual_ work that it was.

“I was never going to miss doing porn. I just didn’t find an alternative I cared about enough and let it keep sliding under my standards because there was nothing else. Besides, even if porn is what I end up going back to, I can do it without Star Destroyer.”

Rey breathes out a little sigh; like she’d been holding her breath for a long time.

She stares out at the waves. His hand spreads out against her warm belly.

“You needed me to choose that on my own, didn’t you?”

“You had to,” she looks at her toes, digging them in the warm sand next to his with a hint of pleasure moving through her. “But oh God, I needed you to. I didn’t know how much longer I could go on resenting the place that pays for your entire life.”

“My family has its own money,” he says, then flinches at his own lame defense.

“And your line of true-to-life dildos,” she snorts.

“I’ll find something.”

She trusts his answer with a weary sigh. Maybe it hurts her that it is that easy. That he has things lined up; when she had to stand in line all her life.

“What are you going to do about Snoke?”

Rey takes a deep breath through her nose. “Camming feels kind of...like a violated space. I’d never feel safe with whoever was watching. I can’t be ignorant of that anymore, and I want to be.”

“Then take a break.”

“Money, remember?”

He shakes his head. “We’ll find you something.”

“I know I can…” she draws a circle in the sand. Formulating a plan. Doing _nothing_ is beyond her capabilities. “You...you know I worked in a stripclub for a year, before I came out here?”

She had never told him that. Even when they were starting out her camshow, which might have been helpful to know she’d had some experience handling...a more personal form of sex work and its clients. Lots of girls who cammed did; in their past and in their present. Logically, it was easy to understand why the two careers could be hand in hand.

But the veil of a screen always protected her in his mind. Kept her safe from unwanted touches, from hearing a voice in the room treat her like shit. Her in person, with gross guys reaching for her, does make him tense up.

She is very still, as though observation in complete silence will give his thoughts away to her.

“Is that what you’d want to do?”

He can’t _let_ her; as it is not a matter of _letting,_ it is not his place to be the one to allow her to do anything. But her sounding so _not thrilled_ with her own idea is going to keep him awake at night if she chooses to see it through.

Her voice is childlike, like she had to go that far back to be able to be the person who could say what she really wanted:

“Not really.”

“Then for fuck’s sake, Rey,” he squeezes around her middle. “We can find you something else. Crash around the house for a few weeks. I have savings. _You_ have savings.”

She laughs softly, sheepish of the truth; she could live off what she’d saved until she found something else, and money wasn’t the problem.

The problem was letting go.

“I had to be useful. To myself. Not only to survive. To feel like I had any value growing up.”

“That doesn’t sound like you had the chance to be a kid.”

She nods. He presses as much of his skin against hers as he can manage. She still shivers.

“Or to trust anyone to take care of you.”

“Yeah,” she finally takes the bait of his leading, “okay, when it was role play, it was like experimenting with my trust levels.”

“Did we push too far?”

“Maybe. But that’s not your fault. I had to trust you to say no. Even if I didn’t know it at the time.”

He presses his brow down to the nape of her neck. Standing by his decisions and the consequences is new territory because of how easy it was for him to give in to her as the foundation of their relationship. They both felt comfortable with her leading.

He led in their intense sexual fantasy land. Those worlds couldn’t stay separate, could never stay separate, even when one was merely private.

“I survived,” she laughs, “I always do.”

“But do you still trust me?”

“It wasn’t a test,” she twists in his arms, cupping his face in her hands. She corrects herself, _“It was not that kind of test._ I wasn’t asking for something I didn’t want just to see if you’d take advantage; I really thought I needed it in the moment.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Her face falls, and she looks down at the blanket again.

“You did the right thing for me. That matters to me. But I will never not be terrified that I now trust you more than I trust myself.”

She lets sand fall through her fingers, handful after handful. "So I trust you. I trust you not to cross those lines even when I'm crossing them first."

He tucks her face into his neck, stretching her out across his body in the sun. She curls up so sweetly against him.

She always trusted him as much as she was ready for. Trust isn’t yes or no, black or white, a switch that gets flipped manually with obvious lines to cross.

It is measured in depth. Degrees. It is finite, demanding practice to strengthen. Like how long one can hold their breath.

“Wasn’t this always so you could feel like you could finally let go?”

She looks up at his face, and he didn’t realize he’d solved this problem before they even came to this part of the conversation without knowing it;

“I always thought if I trusted you fully I’d blink and wind up back at Star Destroyer. Used. Out of control. And on my own, I somehow almost did that to myself.”

With a sad sigh, she leans up against him, slouching like he’s a beach chair. He feels massive, and hulking, and steady with her head lazing against his chest.

This is not an afternoon for a plan. This is not a trip to sketch out what quitting is going to mean, or what comes next, or if there is a way to make art out of porn. 

They are here for her, on this beach, because if they didn't get out of bed this morning and be somewhere together, he doesn't know who they'd be. 

Rey locks eyes with the ocean and he rests his chin on her head and they sit like that for a long time in the kind of shared, comfortable silence with a person that maybe comes once in a lifetime.

They went through a night that sucked. They got out of bed. They came here. 

And after everything they had been through, it was enough to make it feel like everything was going to be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll have smut soon. I needed to get them here first.

**Author's Note:**

> uh, so there's not much I've written for this ship before, and I had a few more scenes of this story in mind, any takers? Come find me on tumblr; secretreylotrash, for moodboards and prompts and all kinds of fun stuff.


End file.
